Oil Springs area, saturated with tar and
water, tended to clog and stall rotary drills.
The first gusher was hit in 1862 at
270 feet. Who struck it is less clear. For
decades historians thought it was a man
named Hugh Nixon Shaw, but recent
scholarship suggests that it was actually
John Shaw, according to an analysis by the
Lambton Country Archives.
The analysis states, “Newspaper articles
from the Toronto Globe and the Hamilton
Times in 1861 and 1862 refer to ‘Hugh Shaw’
as a successful businessman who patented
a still and opened a refinery in Oil Springs.
He died in a tragic accident on February 11,
1863, ‘of suffocation, caused by inhaling poi-
sonous gases from a well at Oil Springs…’
“Primary sources do not support Hugh
as the oil gusher pioneer,” the archives
report continues. “There are no references
to Hugh and the oil gusher in any 1860’s
newspapers. The first reference to Hugh
and the gusher appears two decades later
in Belden’s Illustrated Historical Atlas of
Lambton, Ontario, 1880. Also telling is the
fact that Hugh’s own journal of business
expenditures from 1861 to 1863 does not
refer to the gusher.”
The archive analysis concludes, “John
Shaw was a significantly less successful
businessman. The Toronto Globe described
on February 2, 1862 how ‘… last January
found him a ruined, hopeless man, leered
at by his neighbors, his pockets empty,
his clothes in tatters…’ John got lucky
with his gusher, and his accomplishment
is referenced numerous times in 1860’s
newspapers including the Hamilton Times,
Toronto Leader, Toronto Globe, New York
Times and Sarnia Observer (eight separate
articles). Hamilton Times proclaimed on
January 20, 1862, ‘Mr. John Shaw, from
Kingston, C.W., tapped a vein of oil in
his well…the present enormous flow of
oil cannot be estimated at less than two
thousand barrels per day of pure oil…’”
By 1866 the center of oil production in
the region shifted to Petrolia, Ontario. By
the turn of the century oil was a global
business. Imperial Oil was founded in
Canada in 1906 in an effort to achieve the
economies of scale that drive all commod-
ity industries, and to fend off the Ameri-
can Standard Oil. It didn’t work. Standard
bought a controlling interest in Imperial
in the 1930s.
But innovation did not end in the
region. The refineries and chemical plants
made important advances in fuel and elas-
tomer chemistry as part of the war effort
in the 1940s. Pioneering work in synthetic
rubber sprang from the same ground as
spring poles and jerker rods. Another
technology invented there is for making
polyethylene, the material of plastic bags
and milk jugs. It is called Sclair, named for
the St. Clair River that flows past Sarnia.
In the wake of the Bhopal disaster in
India in 1984 that killed an estimated
15,000 people, the Canadian Chemical
Producers Association developed manda-
tory codes of management practice for
Spring pole drilling rig, Bothwell, Ontario, 1860.
Advertisement for J.M. Williams & Co.’s
Refinery, published in the Daily Spectator
and Journal of Commerce, July 4, 1860.
health, safety and environmental protec-
tion called Responsible Care. Plants in the
Sarnia area were at the forefront of that
development. The codes were adopted by
industry associations in the United States
and worldwide, and compliance is now
certified by third-party audit.
Oil production in the area is now
dwarfed by a single well in Alberta or
Pennsylvania, but it continues. And just a
few minutes’ drive from the gleaming pro-
cess towers around Sarnia stand the weath-
ered wooden remains of those first Wil-
liams and Fairbank wells. They launched a
global industry that changed the world and
now produces close to 100 million barrels a
day. Loved or loathed, it started here. The
preservation and presentation are not as
aggrandizing as are the sites in the United
States, but then, this is Canada.
Gregory DL Morris is an independent
business journalist, principal of Enter-
prise & Industry Historic Research
(www.enterpriseandindustry.com) and
an active member of the Museum’s edito-
rial board.
www.MoAF.org | Fall 2018 | FINANCIAL HISTORY 33