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"GHOSTS AND WORKING TOOLS IN PETROLIA"
by V.W. Bro. Ted Morris
“My cousins told me the old house was
haunted,” I was informed by *Tom Norris. We were driving to Petrolia for
a Saturday morning double second degree. “They got that story from my
uncle. After the kids had been put to bed at night at my grandfather’s,
they heard mysterious knocks from one of the wings of the house.”
Bulk alone was enough to make the house mysterious. The Collins
mansion had 18 rooms overlooked a creek, and was perched just outside
Petrolia on the edge of town. It had two oil wells. Today its
appearance is benign, but then it’s half the size it used to be.
The great thing about Masonic visiting is the stories that open up.
Tom and I were heading to his boyhood haunts to take part in a double
second degree and to do a bit of genealogical research. This trip proved
a primer on Canada’s oil frontier.
WHERE WAS IT DISCOVERED?
Forget California, Texas and Oklahoma. They’re latecomers to the oil
business. So is Alberta. And Pennsylvania? A mere pretender to the
title. The first working oil well in North America (and maybe the world)
was dug in Petrolia in 1858. Petrolia is just 40 miles from Sarnia.
After lodge, I asked the brethren over a pint, why anyone would want to
mine oil in the 1850’s. The internal combustion engine was just a theory
and the automobile wasn’t even a dream. Dust, friction, and darkness
were the answers.
Kerosene was cleaner and cheaper than whale oil. It could be distilled
from tar sands or coal. Its other name was “coal oil”. Commerce was
extending into the night and an increasingly literate population wanted
to read at night. So there was a demand for lighting.
Great gobs of crude petroleum were smeared on axle hubs to reduce wear
and quiet the squeaking wheels.
Oil cooked from crude petroleum was in demand to keep the dust down on
city streets. Paris even considered a sample of raw asphalt from
Petrolia and asked if the town in Canada West (we were not Ontario yet)
could supply enough to pave the Parisian boulevards.
MASONIC EDUCATION
Since this was a Masonic trip, I scrambled for an angle that would
qualify my research as Masonic education. The area history “Hard Oiler”
by Gary May proved interesting. Noah, says May, sealed his ark with
pitch that oozed from natural sources. Shadrack, Meshach and Abednigo
were cast into an early natural gas oven in Iraq (Babylon). Stone walls
of the Tower of Babel and the First Temple at Jerusalem were bonded with
asphalt mortar.
THE FIRST OIL WELL
The first well was a rectangular hole six feet by eight feet wide and
sixty feet deep. Log cribbing was built on the surface. That retaining
wall descended into the pit as men shovelled the clay into buckets and
undercut the walls. Oil seeped in between the timbers and puddled in the
pit. Digging stopped at 60 feet where oil came in at 60 barrels a day.
Later, when the seepage slowed, casings were drilled through the bottom
of the pits for oil wells as we know them, and if there were a gusher,
the pit would contain the flow.
SURFACE OIL
Oil was evident long before it was exploited. Seepage, called surface
oil, went down the creeks in slicks to Lake St. Clair as pre
Confederation pollution. Surface oil can still be collected today. Many
local citizens keep a bottle of it, and sniff the contents to “get a
smell of the town”. Sniffed before bed, it is said to promote sweet
dreams. A dab on the end of the nose is a Lambton County aromatherapy.
PROSPERITY
Oil brought prosperity. Roads replaced clay morass and Petrolia became a
railway centre and refining town. It was a town of fine large
residences, magnificent stone public buildings, and it even had its own
opera house, something Toronto isn’t achieving until later this year.
Mind you, the prosperity was intermittent, disrupted by things such as
The Great Depression. When oil dropped to 40 cents a barrel, oil barons
of the good days started selling off their wells. Imperial Oil was one
of the companies that had faith the price would come up again, and it
did. The railway tracks came up after the refineries were moved to
Sarnia, but those same wells are still pumping oil. Some produce two or
three barrels a day, but those are now $50 barrels.
A HOUSE DIVIDED
Tom’s grandfather, Dr. T. A. Collins sold off in the 40-cent days. The
land he then bought was east of Petrolia had no oil wells nor any
prospect of oil, and it didn’t have a house either. Dr. Collins had no
use for the 18-room mansion in town, so he took half of it with him,
moving it several miles onto the farm. The rest of the structure
overlooking Bear Creek remained a three-walled house for many years,
three sides covered and one side bared to the breezes where the other
half had been. But not any more. It was restored as a four-walled and
smaller residence overlooking the creek and across from the original
fire hall.
Tom wants more family information. We spent some time going over the
past minute books of Petrolia Lodge No. 194 looking for clues. It’s the
town’s oldest lodge, having been instituted in 1867. The next step will
be to contact Washington Lodge, the youngster in town having been
instituted in 1871. The name leads Tom to believe that oil workers from
the United States may have formed its basic membership, and Tom’s
progenitors came from the south.
“I think there was a lodge room in one of those 18 rooms,” he theorizes.
"That might explain the knocks." Whatever his cousins say, Tom doesn’t
hold with ghosts.
MACHINE SHOP A TRADITION
I mentioned that the same old wells are still pumping oil. They slowly
churn away, using the same equipment they started with. When something
breaks, there is always the Baines Machine Shop. It is around the corner
from the new fire hall. The stock of original rig and pump parts are on
inventory and used as templates or models for replacement parts. If it’s
brass or bronze, they can make it.
The old oilfield technology is still making its mark in Masonry in the
Sarnia District. . Harry Cooper, a Master Mason in Petrolia Lodge
fashions brass oil well fittings by day at the Baines shop. But in his
off hours he turns his lathe and drills to artistic endeavours for the
The Craft. Working tools are his specialty. Imagine a navy brass
gavel----hefty but beautiful. Harry’s mother lodge and Washington Lodge
No. 260 share a set of brass working tools marking the centenary of
Washington and in memory of Albert Baines Sr., machinist and Master
Mason in that lodge. Other lodges in the district have similar sets. Ask
to see them when you visit Forest No. 263 in Wyoming, Liberty No. 419 in
Sarnia, or Beaver No. 83 in Strathroy.
The blacksmith’s hammer has also left its mark. David Matheson, a Past
Master of Washington Lodge and a practicing blacksmith, created the
square and compasses marking the front of the Masonic Temple that opened
in 1964. He did the artwork in wood, pressed a sand mold, and cast the
symbols in bronze. Like a true oilrig man, he made them in pieces for
disassembly and maintenance.
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Post script: The town was first called “Durance” because that was the
name of the first postmaster in 1858. But when oil was discovered, the
next postmaster changed the name to Petrolea (note the spelling) in
1866. When the town was incorporated, someone spelled it wrong. It was
Petrolia in all official papers and Petrolea to everyone else, including
the local paper, the Petrolea Topic. The post office changed the name to
Petrolia in 1906.
*Tom is Historian of Prince of Wales No. 630 in Toronto
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Happy
to
Meet Again !
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