The town of Borden opted to demote its status to a community in light of a declining tax base with the pending completion of the Confederation Bridge and the closure of the Marine Atlantic ferry service.

The Prince Edward Island Railway built a line from its mainline near Emerald Junction to the Cape Traverse wharf to facilitate this traffic in the 1880s.

As a result, the federal government announced in 1912 that it had commissioned the construction of a custom-designed railcar ferry, the SS Prince Edward Island at a shipyard in Newcastle upon Tyne, England.

Meanwhile, the construction of the port and a modification of the Prince Edward Island Railway line between Emerald Junction to Cape Traverse required large amounts of equipment on land and water, as well as labourers.

Some prisoners of war from the Central Powers that Canada and the Allies had jailed in the Maritimes were used in the railway construction, while the ferry pier and dock at Carleton Point was built using a large gantry constructed from Douglas Fir to sling armoured stone and pre-cast concrete caissons delivered by barge - some of which was salvaged from an abandoned wharf at nearby Tidnish, Nova Scotia for a marine railway that had been abandoned in the 1880s.

The new port was commissioned in early 1917 when the SS Prince Edward Island began regular service from the new pier, carrying railway freight and passenger cars; she recorded 506 crossings to Cape Tormentine in that first year alone.

The completion of the Trans-Canada Highway across PEI and the neighbouring Maritime provinces in the early 1960s saw Borden host a new automobile-only ferry, the MV Confederation, which was built in 1962.

In 1968, CN stopped operating passenger trains on PEI, switching the service over to buses, and the ferry terminals and parking lots at Borden and Cape Tormentine were redesigned by CN to accommodate more cars and trucks; in Borden's case, part of its rail yard was used for this purpose, with the yard being redesigned in light of declining rail traffic and resulting in the town's original passenger station being demolished.

At the same time, discussion of a permanent crossing (a "Fixed Link" to the mainland) was revived by the federal government after it received several unsolicited proposals.

In 1994, a farm property on Amherst Head, immediately east of Borden, was purchased and a staging facility was constructed for building massive bridge components on shore.

A large pier was built into the harbour to accommodate a heavy lift marine crane which would carry the components into the Northumberland Strait to be installed.

The federal government provided "Fixed Link Adjustment Funds" which saw the development of a tourist shopping complex on the property of the former railway yard, which is now named "Gateway Village".

There is an ongoing government effort to find a new use for the Amherst Head staging facility now abandoned by SCI since the completion of the Confederation Bridge construction project.

The Fire Department serves the local areas of Borden-Carleton, Cape Traverse, Augustine Cove, North Carleton, Searletown, Albany Corner, and Tryon.