Toujours Jeune - Always Young: Thousand Islands, Emery, and The New Frontenac Hotel

Toujours Jeune was the motto of the luxurious New Frontenac Hotel on Round Island in the Thousand Islands area of the St. Lawrence River. The New Frontenac was the crowning project of Charles Goodwin Emery an entrepreneur whose life straddled the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Emery's first enterprise was the purchase from his uncle Eben Goodwin of the tobacco company, Goodwin & Co. in New York. Were he introduced a cigarette making machine and was the first to use baseball cards as a promotion. He placed them in packages of his Old Judge cigarettes. In 1890, Emery joined Goodwin & Co. with James Buchanan Duke's American Tobacco Company. American would go on to become the tobacco trust. Emery was also part of the watch trust through his investment in the Crescent Watch Case Company. Abendroth and Root manufactured a handmade automobile called the Arco. Emery purchased the company around 1906 and changed the name of the car to the Frontenac. It was a high end car costing $4,000 and few were produced; only one remains in existence. Emery's over riding passion was the Thousand Islands region of the St. Lawrence River. There his world class New Frontenac Hotel would set new standards in service and luxury for a resort hotel. His Picton Island Red Granite Co. was another Thousand Islands project as well as farms on Picton and Grindstone Islands. The "black diamond" an area of Grindstone Island noted for the rich black soil was used to grow lettuce and celery. Add to this investments in large tracts of land in California, which later would produce one of the largest oil wells in the state, plus housing developments and you have the life of Charles Goodwin Emery. Toujour Jeune tells the story of the man and his investments.