Reinvigorated historical society catalogues Sarnia’s rich history

The Sarnia Historical Society wants to make local history more accessible to the people who live here.
The three-member board of the society – comprised of Phil Egan, Ron Reale Smith and Laura Greaves – took over the reigns of the nearly defunct organization earlier this year and have launched a number of new initiatives to help Sarnians rediscover their city’s storied past.
Egan, Smith and Greaves, all members of the Lambton County Historical Society, decided to rejuvenate the moribund group after discovering that the once highly active society had recently fallen on hard times.
For over 40 years, the historical society has existed in one iteration or another. The society had a museum on the corner of Christina and Davis Streets for many years before the landlord asked the group to leave in 2012, forcing the group to put all of their local artifacts into storage.  When the society’s president, Dennis Crockford, passed away in Apr. 2013, the group became listless, Greaves said.
“So Phil Egan, Ron Smith and I met because we were all picked to be representatives on the Lambton County Historical Society,” she said. “We got together and we started talking about what was going on in Sarnia with the historical society and nobody really knew. So after a little bit of digging, we realized that nothing was going on and the city was actually winding everything down. So we got in there just in the nick of time.”
After taking over this past March, the trio sat down to discuss their vision of what the society should be. The board decided to focus their efforts on one thing: creating an interactive and accessible website.
“When we took over, we decided that we would take on one big project, and that project was the website,” she said. “We wanted to make it kind of the Wikipedia of Sarnia history with lots of sources and lots of contributors.”
The website – www.sarniahistoricalsociety.com – is laid out in a way that provides people with an abiding interest in their community a way to easily access stories and pictures from Sarnia’s past, Greaves said.
Replete with sordid tales of Sarnia’s most notorious criminals, stories about the city’s most persuasive politicians, efficacious entrepreneurs and compelling characters as well as descriptions and photos of the community’s rapid growth over the past century, the website is chock full of local history, much of which will be brand new to many Sarnia residents.
Stories were taken from local newspaper articles, sections of books regarding a variety of subjects relating to Sarnia’s history, board members’ own contributions and stories submitted by members of the public. The website is designed to be a resource for the whole community, Greaves said, a repository of hundreds of fascinating stories and photographs that shed light on the city’s past.
And the city has a tremendously compelling past, said Greaves.
While each board member brought with them their own particular area of interest, what peaked Greaves’ curiosity was the diverse nature of Sarnia’s past mayors and the peculiar proclivity of Sarnians to elect medical professionals as their leader.
“Everyone has contributed something different to the website. For me I really took a focus on the history of Sarnia’s mayors. It’s just fascinating to hear the different stories about where everyone came from to become mayor,” she said. “We’ve had multiple doctors as mayors, I think two or three, and I just thought that was absolutely fascinating.”
“The first mayor who was a doctor was in the 1800s, and back then doctors weren’t just a personal physician, they oversaw the whole system,” she continued. “So they had kind of a good grasp on society as a whole and they were trusted by the community. So it was a natural fit.”
Aside from the city’s numerous medically minded mayors, local history buffs will also be able to discover through the website a whole host of unique and heretofore little-known stories about Sarnia’s past, everything from the struggles of Sarnia’s early settlers to the history of the Aamjiwnaang First Nation to the escapades of Sarnia’s most notorious gangster (and the subject of an upcoming film), Red Ryan.
“When people hear the Red Ryan story for the first time, they’re always fascinated,” Greaves said of the criminal mastermind who was gunned down in a battle with police on Christina Street. “It’s still kind of an exciting thing to think that there was a shootout in downtown Sarnia.”
“There are also stories about the tremendous growth of the city of the city in the forties and fifties when the plants came,” Greaves continued. “Before that Sarnia was really a small place and then all of the sudden it just boomed. It came to define what the city is today, and the plants still play such an important part in our identity and defining who we are. The layout of the city now really came to be in that time.”
Aside from the launch of the new website, the society has been active in reaching out to the community. The group has already held a ‘history get-together’ at September’s First Friday and plans to host a stop at the upcoming Race To Erase competition.
The society has even more ambitious plans for the upcoming year, including adding new board members and soliciting new ideas during its meeting in October, writing a history of the city’s fire services and working on an oral history of everyday life in Sarnia over the past century. Long-term plans also include the possibility of hosting a speaker’s series and, inspired by the work of the Niagara Historical Society, introducing walking tours.
The strong community support for the society’s efforts have spurred on their ambitious plans, said Greaves.
“It’s really amazing the positive feedback we’ve had,” Greaves said. “We weren’t sure if other people would be as interested and excited as we are, but the feedback has been phenomenal.”
“I think local history is a big part of our identity and we just want to bring people who are interested in Sarnia’s history together and give them a platform,” she said.
For more information about the Sarnia Historical Society, visit the group’s website at www.sarniahistoricalsociety.com. The group also has a Facebook page at www.facebook.com/sarniahistoricalsociety and a Twitter account at www.twitter.com/sarniahistory.