Canadian Pacific Railway president William Van Horne chose Cap Diamant, the cliff overlooking the St. Lawrence River in Old Quebec, as the site for his newest hotel, a spot once occupied by the Château St. Louis, seat of French and then British colonial government until it burned in 1834. Van Horne hired American architect Bruce Price to design a Châteauesque building modeled on the manor houses of France’s Loire Valley, and it opened December 18, 1893, with 170 rooms, 93 of them equipped with private bathrooms and fireplaces, a remarkable luxury for the time.
Van Horne named it for Louis de Buade, Count of Frontenac, the flamboyant 17th-century governor who expanded New France; his coat of arms still marks the entry arch. Architects William and Edward Maxwell added the hotel’s signature central tower in the 1920s, making it Quebec City’s tallest building until 1930. In August 1944, the hotel served as headquarters for the Quebec Conference, where Franklin Roosevelt, Winston Churchill, and Mackenzie King mapped out the final stages of the Second World War.