By Pat McLean, Special for The Sarnia Journal (2015) Ask anyone if they know who Malcolm Cameron was, and most won’t know anything but the name. But we should. In my opinion, he was the true founder of our city. In 1834, Cameron bought 200 acres from the Crown for [...]
by Lawrence A. Crich (1986) Any attempt to get a clear picture of education in Sarnia prior to 1860 is met with frustration. This can probably be better understood when one realizes that the first Sarnia Board of Education was formed only in 1851 and the first recorded surviving minutes [...]
by George Mathewson for The Sarnia Journal (2014) It’s been climbed on, posed beside and rendezvoused at by half the people in Sarnia at one time or another. But the origins of the cannon in Canatara Park, and how it got there, have long been a mystery. Now, two men [...]
by R.W. Ford (1987) Stretching for over 30 kilometres along the St. Clair River from the southern tip of Lake Huron to the village of Sombra lies the largest concentration of petroleum and chemical industry in Canada. Some 25 kilometres inland ancient oil wells grudgingly yield a few barrels of [...]
by Dan McCaffery for the Sarnia Observer The welfare problems facing local politicians today pale beside those encountered by Sarnia's municipal leaders in the late 1870s. Indeed, during Mayor Daniel Mackenzie's administration Council was briefly saddled with a "corporate baby" that was literally dumped in the lap of a startled [...]
by Dan McCaffery for the Sarnia Observer He was the 'Mayor Mike' of the 19th century. Like Mayor Mike Bradley - who liked people to refer to him as 'Mayor Mike' – Michael Fleming was elected Chief Magistrate while still a very young man. In fact, when Mayor Bradley was [...]
by Dan McCaffery for the Sarnia Observer Every time you hop on a bus or flush a toilet you can thank George Stevenson. That's because Sarnia's 10th Mayor was the father of Sarnia Transit and the man who brought indoor plumbing to the municipality, Stevenson, who was born in Glasgow, [...]
by Dan McCaffery for the Sarnia Observer It wouldn't be too much of a stretch to call Charles Taylor the father of the Chemical Valley. That's because Sarnia's ninth Mayor was at the Head of Council when it gave the Bushnell Oil Company permission to build the community's first oil [...]
by Lawrence A. Crich (1986) No history of early education in Sarnia would be complete without some mention of the efforts of the Wesleyan Methodist Missionary Society in Upper Canada on the St. Clair Indian Reserve. The Reserve then covered a much greater area than its modern counterpart stretching north [...]
by Charles Phelps (1980) From the 1870s the Blackwell Sideroad was the dividing line between School Section Three (Bright’s Grove School) and School Section Six (Clark’s School at Murphy Road). The children from Blackwell Sideroad east went to S.S. No. 3 and the children from Blackwell Sideroad west attended S.S. [...]
