Bordered by Lake Ontario and Collins Bay, the Lemoine Point Conservation Area is 136 hectares of forest, field and marsh, with a spectacular waterfront. Many opportunities for recreation and nature appreciation are available in all seasons.
Lemoine Point Conservation Area was purchased by Cataraqui Conservation in 1975 to preserve this significant piece of land for future generations. It is a very popular and heavily-used Conservation Area with more than 2,500 metres of shoreline on Lake Ontario. It is also the last large publicly accessible tract of wooded Lake Ontario shoreline in the region, making it of great importance both as a recreational and a natural area.
Lemoine Point Conservation Area has an interesting history. It's changed hands numerous times since the era of European exploration, when it was part of the seigneury of Robert Cavalier, Sieur de la Salle. The land was seized from the French after the British won the Seven Years War in 1760. After the American Revolutionary War in 1784, it was awarded to the United Empire Loyalist Captain Johan Jots Herkimer. After Captain Herkimer's death in 1795, his third son Nicholas, a farmer, inherited the property and held it untill his death in 1809 when he was murdered in Bath by two blacksmiths. It then remained in the Herkimer family until the 1830s.
Lemoine Point had by then become known locally as Herkimer's Nose, and later as Herkimer's Point.
During the War of 1812, several cannons were planted on Lemoine Point in the expectation that the Americans might land there in an attempt to capture Kingston.
In 1836, Lemoine Point was sold to Captain William Lemoine, a retired British Army officer who settled here. After his death, it was inherited by his son J.W. Lemoine, a bachelor, who was killed in the winter of 1872 when his sleigh overturned on Collin's Bay. The property remained with family relations until the 1910s, and by that time it was partly wooded and partly a farm with a large stone house and other buildings, with a total of two and a half miles of shoreline.
It is the Lemoine family that eventually gave us the current name.
In 1918, the property was purchased by William Hugh Coverdale. He was the son of a prominent Kingston family, and as a boy had actually been known to roam Lemoine Point. As an adult, he moved to the United States and eventually became a wealthy industrialist and financier, including building the Southern Steel Company into a very successful business and being a co-founder and president of Canada Steamship Lines. Thus his wealth enabled him, at the age of 47, to purchase the Lemoine Point. It provided him and his family a retreat from his very busy life, especially for rest and recreation in the summer.
Shortly after buying the property and during excavation for a second stone house, several old cannon balls were unearthed, presumably remnants of the naval action of just over 100 years earlier.
When Coverdale died in 1949, and his wife in 1955, the property was inherited by their four children, who continued to summer at the farm.
Thus it is in large part the Coverdale's use of Lemoine Point as an estate that enabled this natural site to now still be in our midst. The northern entrance road to Lemoine Point, Coverdale Drive, is named after the family.
In the 1960s and 1970s, various local politicians became interested in acquiring Lemoine Point as parkland. Although they ran into many roadblocks, including funding problems and OMB delays, they were eventually successful in 1975 in acquiring a large part (337 acres) on behalf of the Cataraqui Conservation.
An 88 acre section with the stone houses and working farm (the current Lemoine Point Farm) was retained by one of William Coverdale's four children.
