Mary Van Horne
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| Mary Van Horne LAC e007914040 |
Mary Van Horne was Sir William's younger sister. She and her mother came to Minister's Island with Van Horne, and in some ways they, along with Mrs. Van Horne, spent more time there than the great man himself. They had real vacations there, sewing, boating, sketching, gathering mushrooms, practicing on the bicycle, exploring the Island. Sir William, workaholic that he was, like so many of the dynamic industrialists that populated St. Andrews in those days, simply parked his family at a resort for the summer and dropped in occasionally when he could spare the time.
Not a lot is known about Mary. She inherited her brother's talent for drawing. The McCord Museum has many of her watercolors. She was something of a mushroom hound, and her Covenhoven diary for 1869, reproduced below, spends a fair bit of time recounting her discoveries among the fungi of the Island and area. Mary died in 1904, aged 48.