by Dan McCaffery for the Sarnia Observer

(2003) It was a time when The Observer could report in the same edition that an auto maker was considering coming to town and that a runaway horse had smashed through a plate glass window downtown. The first decade of the 20th century was a period of enormous transition, as Sarnia shed the last vestiges of its frontier past.

At the beginning of the decade, the roads were still unpaved, there were no cars, no electric streetlights sidewalks were made of wood, few people had telephones and there was neither a library nor a movie theatre. Ten years later, all of that had changed.

Mayor William Logie kicked off the progress in 1902, presiding over a council that agreed to build a library. He took the action after the great American philanthropist Andrew Carnegie offered $15,000 to help get it off the ground. Even bigger change came four years later when Mayor David Barr convinced council to begin a program of installing electric lamps all over the municipality, starting with 100 in 1906. Such action, he told The Observer, would do more to curb crime that the hiring of additional police constables.

The present VIA rail train station appeared in 1908.

Not all the changes came without controversy. Well-known inventor Thomas Doherty introduced Sarnia to the gasoline-powered car in 1901. According to historian Glen C. Phillips, “even though the car was mechanically sound, it was considered to be quite dangerous by many Sarnians and, consequently, was banned from the roads.”

Mayor Barr came under fire when he signed a petition urging Parliament to allow married women who owned property to vote. And in 1909 Mayor David Milne launched an offensive against what he called “disgusting” movies. He feared the community’s first motion picture theatre would corrupt young children. Youngsters could afford to get into the theatre, he noted, because it charged an admission of just five cents. The theatre manager responded by offering a $10 reward to anyone who could find anything immoral on the silver screen. But Milne got the last word, convincing the manager to bring in some ‘wholesome’ products by threatening to revoke his business license.

As the decade came to a close, Mayor Albert Johnson completed the adjustment to the 20th century by talking Bell Canada into modernizing the town’s phone system, which consisted of 600 telephones.