The 6069 looked well preserved beside the spur leading to the government docks in August 2000.
Back in the 1960s my parents had also stopped at this spot as we travelled through to visit relatives in Clio, Michigan.
In August of 2000, my spouse and I were off to Sarnia because we had not vacationed there before and because I wanted to look at the present-day refinery facilities. We also stopped at the Dawn Hub to see that major natural gas facility.
... Some people like to burn refined kerosene for vacation - we like to see where it originates.
However, the surprise of this vacation was one of best museum combinations I have ever visited. These vacation photos were taken by a point-and-shoot camera during the last days of local automated film processing and printing.
Under the Blue Water Bridge at Sarnia you can see a local switcher near the Thomas Edison Depot Museum in Port Huron, Michigan.
Similar to visiting Windsor-Detroit, the local river concentrates the inter-lake shipping for those interested in watching ships.
Ships and a barge-tug combination head north over the horizon on Lake Huron as seen from Sarnia.
As we drove toward Sarnia along Highway 402, it was striking to see the endless fields of corn. It seems likely that most of this corn was destined for fermentation into biofuel as a gasoline additive. Back then, 'corn biofuel' was a fairly new provincial scheme to subsidize Ontario agribusiness.
I haven't seen persuasive evidence that the less-energy-dense ethanol contributes to less greenhouse gas production ... considering the fuel, pesticide and fertilizer inputs to grow the corn ... and considering the energy needed to produce, transport and blend the ethanol. And ethanol's affinity for water dictates railway tank car transportation, rather than 'product pipeline' transport. The good news? Thanks to ethanol we never have to buy gas line antifreeze!
Pioneers of the oil industry in this region had first collected the oil which had seeped out of the ground. As it sat in the 'gumbeds' its lighter fractions (eg. like gasoline) had evaporated - leaving a thick tarry substance. The earliest commercial use of this field-harvested petroleum was 'tar' for caulking wooden ships.
Crude oil was first produced on a commercial basis at Oil Springs, Ontario in 1858. Horse-drawn wagons carrying oil barrels, and later tank wagons, were used to haul the crude from Oil Springs to the Great Western Railway at Wyoming.
Whale oil had been an important fuel for lighting. The kerosene fraction of the first oil produced was in high demand because of its brighter and cleaner burning qualities in new hi-tech hot blast kerosene lanterns. Modern production techniques would make kerosene cheap and then people could do more things at night.
The lighter components of the oil which were prized as motor gasoline in future decades - were often disposed of in ditches and bodies of water. This is according to an account I read of the early Pennsylvania industry. Otherwise, the unmarketable petroleum was flared off.
The Titusville versus Oil Springs - 'Who was first?' - I'll leave to people who like that kind of thing.
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A commercial:
This post is a direct result of interesting anomalies found within the excellent map resources*
used in my previous postcard-based post about the international railway tunnels in southwestern Ontario.
Specificially, from the
*Historical Topographic Map Digitization Project
https://ocul.on.ca/topomaps/
All top map images in this post are from the 1912, 1 inch:1 mile, Sarnia sheet, topographic map from that website.
Note: Above, there are at least two railway roundhouses in Sarnia,
but neither of them is labelled as an 'engine house' (EH).
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| Petroleum - Prehistoric to Petrochemicals; GA Purdy; 1957; Copp Clark. |
Fans of the Temiskaming and North Ontario Railway will recognize that name Jacob Lewis Englehart (1847-1921). He was one of those who worked to establish Imperial Oil as a collective effort by Canadian companies to dominate the Canadian oil market and meet the competition of John D Rockefeller's Standard Oil of the US.
... The purchase of Imperial Oil in 1898 by Standard Oil resulted in the former's Petrolia, Ontario refinery being shut down in favour of the new refinery built by Standard Oil at Sarnia. The location of this Sarnia refinery is shown on the topographic map above.
The rest of the post will look at the local map from 1912, scenes of early oil drilling and production, and the interesting museum artifacts we saw in 2000.
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| from: Oil Springs ... The Birthplace of the Oil Industry in North America; Michael O'Meara; 1958, 1998; Oil Museum of Canada. |
The map above, shows the general orientation of the key towns and cities in this post.
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Below, the 1912 topographic map shows the locations of Petrolia and Oil Springs
and the railway lines in the area.
Notice all the engine houses ...
Below: It would be meaningless to reproduce the map scale,
but here is the consolidated legend for these 1912 map segments.
Here is a larger version of the Petrolia segment.
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| from: Oil - The History of Canada's Oil & Gas Industry; Ed Gould; 1976; Hancock House. |
Above, you can see a drilling table, a chain turned around a wooden pole and a ratchet gear.
There are whole books written about the development of early drilling equipment.
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| from: Petroleum - Prehistoric to Petrochemicals; GA Purdy; 1957; Copp Clark. |
Above: You can see a horse-drawn tank wagon taking on a load of crude oil. The stack of a stationary steam engine is also shown. It looks as if the engine steam dome is connected by a pipe to the wagon! Probably, the engine could have been used to run a pump to load the oil wagon - when it was not actively being used for drilling.
Below: Many different drilling technologies were tried. With this example a walking beam was used to lift and drop a drilling rod - pounding and breaking the rock below. The circulation of drilling 'mud' to clear the fragmented rock from the drilling face was a practice not yet invented.
With the shallow deposits exploited by the early petroleum drillers, it was probably not too critical to keep the bore clear. Petroleum deposits often had a 'cap' of compressed natural gas. If this pocket of gas was struck first, it would certainly clear out the bore hole!
Sometimes, the gas would blow the oil up in an uncontrolled manner as a 'gusher'. Sometimes, the gas dome might be struck first, venting itself before the oil layer was reached. Just like coal miners, who had special traditional names for the poisonous 'damps' they encountered underground, it seems likely that the early oil drillers were sometimes poisoned on the spot by petroleum gas bearing particular toxins.
The first gusher in world history occurred on 16 January 1862 at Oil Springs and it spewed out about 2000 barrels per day. Before it was brought under control, about 100,000 barrels of oil had been deposited on the landscape. Looking at the watercourses shown on the topographic maps, you can only imagine what kind of condition they were in during this era.
In any case, the natural gas was vented to atmosphere as another unmarketable type of petroleum. No system had yet been invented to capture, compress and ship it through pipelines.
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| from: Petroleum - Prehistoric to Petrochemicals; GA Purdy; 1957; Copp Clark. |
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| from: Petroleum - Prehistoric to Petrochemicals; GA Purdy; 1957; Copp Clark. |
Above: Numerous jerker rods systems are being used to actuate the walking beams which are pumping oil from the well shafts below. In the foreground: This may be a pipe which collects the small amounts of oil produced at each well so the flows can be consolidated into a tank for collection and transport.
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| from: Petroleum - Prehistoric to Petrochemicals; GA Purdy; 1957; Copp Clark. |
Above: No doubt the bunker at the right contains coal to power the pumping steam engines and perhaps to heat the oil during the refining process. Early in petroleum history, wooden barrels of oil were floated down watercourses and across harbours to ships. This process of free water transportation was similar to the log drives used in the forest products industry.
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| from: Petroleum - Prehistoric to Petrochemicals; GA Purdy; 1957; Copp Clark. |
The dome of a railway tank car can be seen in the foreground. Perhaps a failed still boiler lies between the tank car and the closest horse and wagon.
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Images from August 2000
Both Oil Springs and Petrolia had fascinating museum displays. The images which follow are not in 'negative order' or sorted by location. Instead they are illustrating the technology as effectively as I can.
Above is a central 'engine house' with giant flywheels (at Petrolia, I believe) which would have originally been driven by a stationary steam engine (notice the small electric 'museum engine' at the left). If you can imagine the power, noise and inertia in this engine house during its steam days ... be ready to marvel at how it is transmitted and stepped down.
In the end, its transmitted inertia becomes as gentle and quiet as a pendulum-driven grandfather clock.
On this very, very hot day, the prototypical crude oil, creosote, sulphur, tar smell hung heavily in the air. The circular motion on a vertical plane has been stepped down, and changed to a reciprocating motion transmitted on a horizontal plane (I think) by that assembly seen behind the museum interpreter.
The large 'jerker rod' coming toward the camera is quietly and efficiently swinging longitudinally - suspended from those hooks.
Rocking almost silently, this line of jerker rods is simulated to be powering the pump jack by that distant display shelter (perhaps housing an original oil wagon). You can see an early railway tank car in the distance.
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| from: Early Development of Oil Technology; Wanda Pratt & Phil Morningstar; 1987; Oil Museum of Canada. |
Although this simulated pump jack is kind of broken, it wins an award for best use of recycled railway hardware - the tie plate weights and the cross-tie.
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Here is a view of a nicely-presented walking beam and its pump jack.
Here is a variation on this type of equipment, designed to exert a greater amount of force with each stroke.
I think the photos have now made a round trip back to Petrolia to see this old riveted collection tank. The interpreter showed us the production of a well which was still in operation ... churning inside a well 'Look Tank'. It was water with a very strong raw crude smell. In the water could be seen small droplets of oil in suspension. If I remember correctly the oil probably ascended that modern pipe into the tank above. While we were there, a present-day tank truck from an oil company came to pick up the liquid for refining.
Every museum should have its own oil well to provide supplementary income!
Those quiet and unique operating jerker rod systems really enhanced the museum experience because they ranged over much wider areas than traditional museum displays do. Regularly coming into contact with distinctive hydrocarbon smells was also part of the larger historical experience. This was clearly the area in which significant industrial events had occurred.
Expressed from a modern perspective ... in its heyday, the area had gone through a noisy, very dangerous, low technology industrial boom accompanied by successive large- and small-scale environmental disasters and insults to the countryside. Occupational exposure to carcinogens, burns and traumatic physical injury were part of the oil business from its beginnings - 165 years ago in Oil Springs.
But ... worldwide, we still burn up 100,000,000 barrels of this substance every single day as nothing can yet match, with comparable safety (burning automotive lithium ion batteries aboard Fremantle Highway, I'm looking at you!) the portable power it contains.
A couple of nice railway artifacts from the days of Ontario's oil boom.