The Jamaica Observer

When you consider the hundreds of motor vehicles one person sees in a typical day in the city, supported by a network of filling stations, sales lots and repair facilities, it's hard to believe that the petroleum industry hasn't been with us forever. In fact, it's just 150 years old. And the place where it all started is also one of the most modest you can imagine.

The small community of Oil Springs, with fewer than a thousand inhabitants, is tucked away in the south-western corner of the Canadian province of Ontario, up the road a bit from the motor cities of Windsor, Ontario, and Detroit, Michigan, which are separated by the Detroit River which forms the border in that section. It was in this small town, then known as Black Creek, that the world's first commercial oil well was sunk in 1858. The wells still produce oil at about the same rate as they did in the beginning, but that amounts to about 35,000 barrels a year. By comparison, the giant excavators, dump trucks and processing plants in the western province of Alberta extract more than a million barrels a day from the oil sands!

The native people who lived in the area always knew about what were called the gum beds - pools of oil which seeped to the surface. They used the substance for a variety of purposes, including waterproofing their canoes. A local businessman, Charles Tripp, received official approval to begin North America's first commercial oil company in Black Creek. Then along came John Miller Williams who took over Tripp's asphalt company. He started digging a water well, only to come up with oil instead. He extracted a light oil from the petroleum and sold it as lamp fuel. Taking their cue from this event, the influential people in the town changed its name from Black Creek to Oil Springs, and it was formally incorporated in 1865. Oil Springs is observing the anniversary with celebrations over several months, and there is quite a bit to celebrate.

The town's first free-flowing well came into production in 1860, operated by a man called Leonard Vaughan. The importance of this is that the oil came out of the pipe by geologic pressure, and required no pump. Perhaps the most important development for Oil Springs began in 1861, when a surveyor, John Henry Fairbank, bought a half-acre plot and dug his first oil well, which he called "Old Fairbank". The company he founded is still in operation, now run by his great-grandson, Charlie Fairbank, and is the oldest petroleum company in the world. It is by far the town's biggest oil producer, accounting for about 24,000 barrels a year from 320 wells.

The oil is sucked from the ground in the same manner as in John Henry's day - a length of tube with a leather flap at the bottom is jerked back and forth inside the well by a big arm made of wood with metal straps, atop a tower over the well. It is powered by wooden jerkers which stretch along a frame right back to a small hut. John Henry invented the jerker system, using a steam engine in the hut. Nowadays, the steam engine is replaced by a five-horsepower electric motor which can operate two pumps. Shortly after the oil pioneers started business in Oil Springs, petroleum was also discovered in the nearby town of Petrolia, kicking off a 40-year oil boom. Oil Springs was almost abandoned, but the discovery of oil at a deeper level than the original wells in 1881 renewed interest in the town. Pipelines were constructed to link Oil Springs with Petrolia.

There is another centre connected with the origins of Canada's petroleum industry - Leduc, Alberta. Just north of the town in central Alberta, a short distance away from the provincial capital, Edmonton, explorers for the Imperial Oil Company - which operates the Esso franchise in Canada - drilled a series of holes in the 1940s. After drilling 133 dry wells, they tapped into a huge oil field on February 13, 1947, and the gusher that ensued brought the province into the world of petroleum. The field has been played out, and the oil companies have turned their attention elsewhere, notably to the oil sands in the north. They come with some serious environmental baggage, as extracting the oil they contain requires large amounts of heat and water, and the sand and waste water left over require huge containment areas that affect wildlife and aquifers.

Official recognition of the efforts of these pioneers came in 1960 with the opening of an oil museum in Oil Springs. Four of them - John Henry Fairbank, James Miller Williams, Charles and Henry Tripp - were inducted into the new Canadian Petroleum Hall of Fame in Leduc in 1997.
Nowadays, the city of Sarnia close to Oil Springs is an important centre of Canada's petroleum refining and petro-chemical industries. Many of the big oil companies have operations there, refining oil transported by pipeline from Alberta and Saskatchewan, as well as the trickle from the old wells in Oil Springs and Petrolia.

We usually associate oil fields with large machines devouring stretches of the landscape and creating a grand mess. But the operations in Oil Springs are in tune with nature. On a visit to the area some years back I was impressed by the sight of the oil-fashioned pumps sucking the oil out of the ground into holding tanks amid trees and lots of green grass and shrubbery. The displays of the old technology and the history of the finds are spread out around the site in a nature-friendly manner, with simple dirt paths between them.
Charlie Fairbank has a natural solution for one of the problems which affect his pumps - grass growing too high can interfere with the jerker lines, and there is no farm equipment which can keep the lines clear. He has a flock of sheep which graze away among the old wood-and-iron machinery. Fairbank recently told the Toronto Star, "There's this symbiotic relationship - people, sheep, oil. It gets into the natural realm of things rather than the industrial. Everything here is human scale."