New Brunswick's tree-lined capital on the Saint John River — where Fredericton is the smallest provincial capital in Canada by population and the only one to be primarily a government, university, and garrison city rather than a commercial centre, the Historic Garrison District (the stone barracks and guardhouse where British troops were garrisoned from 1784 to 1869, now a national historic site on the Saint John River waterfront) contains the most intact collection of British colonial garrison buildings in Canada, the Beaverbrook Art Gallery (founded 1959 by newspaper magnate Lord Beaverbrook) holds three Salvador Dalí paintings — the largest Dalí collection in a Canadian public gallery — alongside Cornelius Krieghoff's definitive depictions of 19th-century habitant Quebec life, and the City of Elms (Fredericton's other identity, as a cathedral city of towering elm trees planted in the 1850s) lines every residential street for 5 km on both sides of the river
Fredericton (65,000 city; 110,000 metro) is the capital of New Brunswick and the smallest provincial capital in eastern Canada — a colonial-era garrison and administrative city on the Saint John River that serves as the seat of the New Brunswick government and home to the University of New Brunswick (Canada's oldest English-language university, founded 1785). Fredericton was the capital of the Province of New Brunswick at its establishment in 1784 as a Loyalist colony.
Fredericton was built on the traditional territory of the Wolastoqiyik (Maliseet) people, whose name for the Saint John River — Wolastoq, 'the good river' — was adopted as the name of the river's Indigenous people under Canada's 2016 constitutional recognition. The city was established in 1785 as the capital of the new Province of New Brunswick, created specifically to house the tens of thousands of American Loyalists who fled to British North America after the American Revolution. Fredericton was named for Prince Frederick, Duke of York and Albany (second son of King George III). The Univers…