Oil Springs ( http://www.oilsprings.ca )

The aptly named Oil Springs is where the modern oil industry first sparked. In the early 1850s, The Geological Survey of Canada was inspecting the sticky tar-like gum beds where oil had seeped to surface.

By 1852, Charles Nelson Tripp and his brother Henry were already on the scene and using the gum beds to produce asphalt for paving. They knew there was a ready market; Paris, France had asphalt sidewalks since 1838.

The brothers formed the International Mining and Manufacturing in 1854 and the next year their asphalt won honourable mention at the Universal Exhibition in Paris. The city even ordered enough asphalt to pave its streets! Alas, the Tripps were mired in financial and transportation woes.  They sold their land to James Miller Williams in 1855.

Williams was not interested in asphalt, he wanted the gum beds so that he could produce an inexpensive lamp oil. The world was hungry for this product too. In 1854, Dr. Abraham Gesner of Nova Scotia had the U.S. patent for making it from crude. By 1858, James Miller Williams had dug the well that changed the world and he was producing lamp oil. Both men have been called The Father of Refining. This same year rail was built between London and Sarnia.      

The oil rush was on! Hundreds of men arrived. By 1861, 400 wells had been dug or drilled. The pioneers invented on the run and the population ballooned to 4,000. One new arrival was John Henry Fairbank who would later become Canada’s largest single oil producer. He was in Oil Springs a year before Canada’s first gusher came in when Hugh Nixon Shaw drilled to a new depth. It was 1862 and it gushed out of control for days. It was one of 33 special “flowing wells” of Oil Springs that needed no pump. But the boom was short-lived.

By 1866, the action all swung to Petrolia where another boom was underway, one that would last for decades. Courtesy of www.2008celebrate.com

Video links:

Oil Discovery

Oil Springs

Hugh Nixon Shaw