Borden-Carleton is a town in Prince County in the Canadian province of Prince Edward Island. It is situated on the south shore fronting on the Northumberland Strait. The town was originally incorporated as a community on April 12, 1995, through the amalgamation of the town of Borden and the community of Carleton. 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. Borden-Carleton became a town on July 31, 2012.

Borden traces its history to Prince Edward Island's requirements for transportation to mainland North America, whereas Carleton was a surrounding farming community to the north and west of the port.

Borden's development is related to the fall of fortunes for another nearby community during the First World War. A winter iceboat service crossed the Abegweit Passage between nearby Cape Traverse to Cape Tormentine, New Brunswick for many decades during the 19th century and early 20th century. 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.

By the 20th century, the federal government began to face the reality of an unreliable winter iceboat service, which existed primarily due to the Dominion having failed to meet its obligation to provide "continuous steamship service" under the Prince Edward Island Terms of Union, when the province entered Confederation in 1873. 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.

The new ferry, to be operated by Canadian Government Railways (later merged into the Canadian National Railways system), was to operate from a new year-round port to be built at Carleton Point, several kilometres west of Cape Traverse; the harbour at Cape Traverse having been deemed unsuitable for a deep draught vessel due to siltation and the need for continuous dredging, despite being the most direct point on Prince Edward Island opposite Cape Tormentine.

The SS Prince Edward Island arrived in the Northumberland Strait in 1915 during the early years of the war but the port at Carleton Point had not been constructed, so the vessel operated in year-round service out of Charlottetown and Georgetown from 1915 until the port at Carleton Point was ready.

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 the Chignecto Marine Transport Railway that was abandoned in the 1890s.

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 winter of 1917 saw a spectacular sight as dozens of houses and buildings that had been constructed in the port of Cape Traverse to the east were moved by horse and sleigh across the winter sea ice along the coast to the new port at Carleton Point. When the extension of the railway line to the new ferry port was completed, the remnant of the line running to Cape Traverse was abandoned.