Oil Springs, Ont., celebrates 150 years as birthplace of petroleum industry

By Tamsyn Burgmann, The Canadian Press

TORONTO - Of all the long-standing rivalries between the United States and Canada, there's one that few know about but which has lingered for more than a century: the latter country's claim to fame as the birthplace of the modern petroleum industry.

Alberta has nothing to do with it, however. Instead, the honour goes to a quaint village in the swampy backwaters of southwestern Ontario.

It's mostly within the boundaries of the Oil Heritage District, southeast of Sarnia, that people are aware of the aptly named village of Oil Springs, Ont., and its cherished status as the site of North America's first commercial oil well.

Indeed, it was an enterprising Hamilton man and his crew who touched off the continental oil rush in 1858, one full year before U.S. prospector Edwin Drake began drilling for oil in Titusville, Penn.

"As Canadians, we were able to play a role in initiating what is truly the modern petroleum age that has shaped our western life for the past 150 years," said Robert Tremain, museum curator for Lambton County.

"There's the Drake oil well at the Pennsylvania site that claims that, and others that say they're where the modern petroleum age began - but we just happened to beat them to it."

Some 150 years ago Saturday, a handful of men trekked into the mosquito-infested marshlands of a place known as Black Creek. With a pick, shovel and sheer might, they dug at least four metres into gummy earth, buttressing the hole with boards and sinking a shaft as they worked.

Eventually, they struck what they dubbed "black gold," named that first well Williams No.1 - after the Hamilton man, James Miller Williams - and changed the area's name to Oil Springs.

Area residents will converge on the 800-strong village this weekend, starting with a noon parade march to the preserved well site, to commemorate and reflect on the anniversary.

"We call it 'the spark that ignited the world,"' said Connie Bell of the Oil Museum of Canada, which plays host to the weekend's festivities.

"Most people who do come through the door, they say, 'We had no idea what was here, that there was even oil in this area."'

Once word of the discovery travelled, the population of Oil Springs shot up overnight, to about 3,000 people. But the oil dried up quickly, and a major find only kilometres north sent many in the town packing to the town of Petrolia.

In the early 1860s, John Henry Fairbank built the area's first hardware store and bank. He eventually became Canada's largest single oil producer, developing an oil pumping system that became known as a jerker line.

Visitors to the region can still hear the rhythmic creak as the historic technology continues to pump 320 wells run by Fairbank's great-grandson, Charles, to produce 24,000 barrels of oil per year.

The region produces 70,000 barrels in total, from just a handful of producers.

"We've got an industry that's surviving as a cottage industry," Tremain said.

"The day may well come that we have to pump those wells and get every last bit of oil out of the ground. It may not always be as liberally flowing as it has in the past, and the oil has to be coaxed from oil wells of the planet, and that's exactly what this system excels at."

It's these Ontario oil fields, and the lessons they hold for North America's oil-dependent society, that Tremain and his peers hope will raise the area's profile and boost its bid to be designated a UNESCO World Heritage site.

Charles Fairbank himself said he believes the world has reached "peak oil" - the point at which half the world's oil supply is gone, and the rest is rapidly declining. No one, his grandfather included, likely could have imagined society's dependency on the product today, he said.

Fairbank, who just bought two electric bicycles (his wife drives a Prius), said he hopes the anniversary reminds people about the value of crude oil and the need to preserve it.

"Three tablespoons, for instance, is the work of a man for eight hours," he said.

"If you look at oil in terms of the energy it has, we've devalued it, we've cheapened it, so that we can commit the kind of folly we do in which we have a 4,000-pound carapace as a car which takes us to buy a quart of milk at the store."

As for the cross-border rivalry, Fairbank characterizes it as "friendly," but also spouts facts to stack the deck in the village's favour: the skilled workforce that grew from the Oil Springs and Petrolia tradition has since spread to at least 87 countries across the globe.

"We're the bunch that drilled the first well in the Middle East, for instance - six people from Petrolia drilled that well on May 26, one o'clock in the morning, 1908," he said.

"There's no question, Canada wins hands down."