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The grand stone-and-brick buildings of tiny PETROLIA , just off Hwy 21 about 35km southeast of Sarnia, speak volumes about the sudden rush of wealth that followed the discovery of oil round here in 1855. This was Canada's first oil town and as the proceeds rolled in so the Victorian mansions and expansive public buildings followed. Several have survived, dotted along and around the main drag, Petrolia Line. Three prime examples are the Municipal Offices , at Petrolia and Greenfield, Nemo Hall , 419 King at Victoria, an impressive brick building decorated by splendid wrought-iron trimmings, and St Andrew's Presbyterian church , close by at Petrolia and Queen, which is awash with neo-Gothic gables and towers. To emphasize the town's origins, its streetlamps are cast in the shape of oil derricks, but really, once you've had a scout round the architecture there's no reason to hang round. Some 10km to the south along Hwy 21, the hamlet of OIL SPRINGS once formed the nucleus of a rough-and-ready frontier district whose flat fields were packed with hundreds of eager fortune-seekers and their hangers-on. The first prospectors were attracted to the area by patches of black and sticky oil that had seeped to the surface through narrow fissures in the rock. These gum beds had long been used by local native peoples for medicinal and ritual purposes, but it was not until Charles and Henry Tripp of Woodstock incorporated their oil company in 1854 that serious exploitation began. Four years later, James Miller Williams dug North America's first commercial oil well, and in 1862 a certain Hugh Shaw drilled deeper than anyone else and, at 49m, struck the first gusher. The shock of seeing the oil fly up into the trees prompted Shaw, a religious man, to use the words of his Bible - "And the rock poured me out rivers of oil" (Job 29:6). Shaw became rich, but his luck ran out just one year later when he was suffocated by the gas and sulphur fumes of his own well. At the height of the boom, the oilfields produced about 30,000 barrels of crude a day, most of it destined for Sarnia, transported by stagecoach and wagon along a specially built plank road. Just 1km south of Oil Springs, signposted off Hwy 21, the Oil Museum of Canada (May-Oct daily 10am-5pm; Nov-April Mon-Fri 10am-5pm; $3.50) has been built next to the site of James Williams' original well. Highlights of the open-air display area include a nineteenth-century blacksmith's shop, with some fascinating old sepia photos taken during the oil boom, and an area of gum bed. The inside of the museum has a motley collection of oil-industry artefacts and background geological information. Oil is still produced in the fields around the museum, drawn to the surface and pushed on into an underground system of pipes by some seven hundred low-lying pump jacks.
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