by Paul Morden for the Sarnia Observer

(2014) Sarnia was actually Canada’s  second, or perhaps even third, Chemical Valley.

By 1914, the year Sarnia became a city, its Imperial Oil refinery employed 1,200 workers, covered nearly 110 acres on the St. Clair River and manufactured products ranging from kerosene to more than three million wax candles a year. But in the late 1800s, London was the centre of the country’s oil refining business, fed by crude arriving on trains from the oil fields in Petrolia and Oil Springs.

Author Gary May, who wrote Hard Oiler and other books about the early oil industry, said several refineries were built east of Adelaide Street in London and their successful owners built themselves mansions, including several that still exist on that city’s Dufferin Avenue.

Sarnia sat on the periphery of the new industry in those days, but that changed in just a few years. Imperial Oil, the company formed in 1880 by Jake Englehart and others, refined oil in London until a lightning strike several years later ignited a fire that burned it to the ground.

By that time, London residents were fed up with the fires and the smell from the refineries and its city council turned down a request from Imperial Oil for a grant to help it build a pipeline from the Lambton oil fields. Instead, the company moved its refinery to Petrolia and, May said, “Londoners cheered.” But the company’s stay in Petrolia was short-lived and in 1897 Imperial Oil secured a five-year tax break from Sarnia’s town council to upgrade an existing small refinery there.

“Sarnia was better suited for transport over water and so Imperial moved up the Plank Road,” May said. That move came around the time Imperial Oil found itself short of the capital needed to continue growing, and a controlling interest in the company was sold to John D. Rockefeller’s Standard Oil Company.

“Imperial ceased to be a Canadian company but Sarnia’s place at the heart of Canadian oil, refining and chemical production had been cemented,” May said. He believes that was inevitable because London and Petrolia both suffered from a lack of easy access to shipping. “The Thames River was no substitute for the Great Lakes system on which Sarnia was blessed to have been located,” May said.

“Petroleum needed a port and Sarnia provided a great port.”