Book Excerpts

Canada West's Last Frontier by Jean Turnbull Elford
	"Oil discovered at Oil Springs in 1858 changed Enniskillen in a hurry. Land that couldn't be sold at any price was suddenly in demand. Speculators, many of them American, bought sight unseen. A road from Oil Springs to Wyoming, practically impassable in the spring and fall, became a main thoroughfare. Gangs of men with their families took up residence in hastily constructed shanties. The countryside was punctured with wells, and tri-pod derricks dotted the landscape. Oil Springs and then Petrolia were incorporated. The long isolation was over, and for nearly 50 years the name of Enniskillen was synonomous with oil." (p. 45)
Hard Oiler! by Gary May
	"...Today, the historic oil fields remain. They are not the boiling pot of human activity they once were, but rather quiet, orderly places where the squeak and sigh of the jerker rods supplant the rush of the wind across the pancake landscape. There [in Oil Springs], old wells still pump small amounts of crude in the shadow of Sarnia's Chemical Valley, the maze of refineries and chemical plants that is the legacy, strung out like shiny pearls along the St. Clair River. The old wells of the historic field now produce, over the course of a year, only as much as the Hibernia well pumps in less than two days. Yet they remain as statues to a more glorious past. It's hard to imagine how such a fascinating story could go largely unknown. Fascinating, yes, but also important to the understanding of this significant Canadian contribution to the world. When we think of the discovery of oil, why do we think of Texas and Alberta and Saudi Arabia? How could these events have happened and we Canadians not know it?..." (p. 11-12)
Lambton County's hundred years 1849-1949 by Victor Lauriston
	"When, about the year 1833, the strong tide of white settlement set toward Lambton, there was one area which the pioneers avoided. That was the Great Enniskillen Swamp. This vast, forbidding expanse of timbered swamp covered most of Enniskillen Township, but in some directions it extended much farther. Here, in the heart of Lambton County, natural conditions were far less inviting to the home-seeker than the more accessible fringes where settlement came much earlier. It was one of the ironies of fate that, beneath this forbidding surface, were concealed riches that were to make Lambton famous, and were, within a few decades, to bring a rush of population that far surpassed any other portion of the country." (p. 137)
Rivers of Oil by Hope Morritt
	"Canadians are slow to praise their hereos, and nothing proves it more than the story of the early oil men who launched an industry in this remote corner of Ontario [Oils Springs]. Few Canadians-and certainly fewer Americans-know the names of these heroes; no book has put them together in the same way that the life and time of the early oil men of Pennsylvania have been documented. Their lives are scattered in diverse articles, early census records, newpaper accounts, fragments of letters and diaries where their hopes, dreams, fears, and disappointments are hidden, too. Rivers of Oil tells the story of these heroes, the first to discover oil in North America. It is a story of greed and avarice, hate and love, violence and shattered dreams, but also a story of vast riches and the struggle of oil pioneers to control a wayward infant. Canada has a rich oil history, dating back to 1852 when a ruggedly-handsome young man named Charles Nelson Tripp probed through tarry residues in a swamp near Sarnia, Ontario to manufacture asphalt. Five years later, James Miller Williams, a bewhiskered, stubborn carriage-maker from Hamilton, cut a swathe in the earth in this same area and found oil. By 1858, Williams was selling his crude and refined product in Canada and the U.S.A. But this story is not well-known by Canadians and hotly disputed by Americans who lay claim to the 'first' oil well." (p.8-9)