The Toronto Railway Museum is proud to announce the next lecture in our 2023 lecture series The Railways that Spurred Early Oil’s Expansion. Participants will be given special access to our Zoom webinar room for this event, where they can directly engage with our presenters and our museum’s historians. Admission to this event is free of charge, but we do require participants to register in order to secure your space in the virtual room.

Before the arrival of the railroads local growth and development in Lambton County was at a standstill, the marshy land was not attractive to new settlers. This all changed in 1858 with the arrival of the Grand Trunk Railroad and the first commercial oil well dug by James Miller Williams starting production in Oil Springs Ontario. The Black Gold Rush started attracting men from all over to seek their fortunes in the booming oil industry. The problems arise from lack of infrastructure on how to get this valuable product out of the swamps of Lambton. In this talk we will look at how the booming oil industry and railroads are intrinsically linked in Lambton County spurring development from the building of the private Petrolia Spur line to the St Clair Tunnel to the USA.