Description of Historic Place

The McAdam Railway Station is a large, two-and-a-half-storey, stone, Chateau-style railway station and hotel building. Built in 1900-01 and enlarged in 1910-11, it dominates its immediate surroundings in the small town of McAdam, New Brunswick. The formal recognition consists of the building on its footprint as it existed at the time of designation.

Heritage Value

The McAdam Railway Station was designated a national historic site in 1976 because of its association with the development of the Canadian Pacific Railway (CPR) and because it is a rare surviving example of both a station in the Chateau Style and one which combined a station with a hotel.

Built at the turn of the century, the McAdam station illustrates the beginning of a period of tremendous growth and expansion for the CPR. It is one of the largest, surviving examples of the Chateau style from the CPR inventory. Built to replace an earlier station, it reflects McAdam’s prosperity and importance as a railway junction and the expectation that this would continue. The McAdam station is a rare surviving example of a combined railway station and hotel. While its layout is typical of stations of its size in terms of functional arrangements and features, it is distinguished by the incorporation of hotel facilities. No longer functioning as an active station, the building now is maintained by the McAdam Historical Restoration Commission Inc.

Source: Historic Sites and Monuments Board of Canada, Minute, June 1976; Commemorative Integrity Statement, 1999.

Character-Defining Elements

The key elements that relate to the heritage value of the McAdam Station include:
- its elongated, rectangular massing with end pavilions;
- exterior features characteristic of the Chateau style, including its lively silhouette created by steeply pitched, hipped roofs with bellcast eaves, gabled dormers, a tower with a pointed spire, and stone construction materials;
- exterior features characteristic of the Richardsonian Romanesque style, including the rough texturing and overall massive appearance of the stone masonry, specifically the use of local grey granite, with large, regularly coursed, rough-faced blocks below the wide platform eaves, randomly coursed, smoother-faced rubble above the platform eaves, dressed stone copings with spherical finials articulating the stone-gabled dormers along the roof, distinctive corbelled stringcourses accentuating the central and north pavilions, window surrounds and quoins emphasized in Welsford red granite;
- exterior features characteristic of turn-of-the-century railway stations, including wide eave overhangs at the platform level supported by large, evenly spaced timber brackets and stationmaster’s bay on the platform side;
- the variety of window openings and sizes such as the large segmentally arched openings of the ground floor, smaller elliptical openings of the central pavilion, paired and single multi-paned double-hung windows, the use of stone transom bars and wood-panelled doors with multi-paned lights;
- surviving elements of the combined railway/hotel plan, particularly the large passenger waiting room and dining room occupying the entire width of the building on the ground floor and the double-loaded corridor configuration of small, repetitive offices and hotel rooms on the second floor;
- surviving original millwork, including decorative pilasters and beam casings, window and door casings, carved newel posts and stair components, V-grooved wainscotting, and baseboards;
- surviving original light fixtures;
- its relationship to its site, including a pond to the east, Saunders road to the west, tracks on both sides of the station, and location of the building on elevated ground, dominating the vista along Saunders Road.