Lambton County is located in the middle of a vast swamp. For this reason, it was one of the last parts of Canada West to be settled in by Europeans. Many natives of the area inhabited Walpole Island (and still do, to this day). They were joined in a league by the Three Fires Confederacy, consisting of the Ojibwa, Podowadami, Ottawa tribes. These natives lived as hunter/gatherers. They also used a Clan system to distribute responsibilities throughout the community. Some groups were responsible for regulating fishing and hunting, while others dealt with medicine or acted as warriors. The first European settlers to make their homes in Lambton were the French. They became Loyalists, coming from Detroit after the War of 1812. Raymond Baby was a wealthy man, who obtained much of the land along the St. Clair River. His grandson, Francis Baby, was responsible for building the area’s first Catholic Church. Despite their industrious efforts, they had fairly good relations with the Native people of the area. There was a mutual respect between them. The Natives benefitted from the relationship, obtaining iron, steel, silk cloth, ivory combs, and steel plows.

The Wilkes brothers of Brantford came to Sombra Township in 1850. They took advantage of the swampy forests of Lambton, purchasing 2000 acres of land and then harvesting the trees for lumber. A wave of settlers came to the new town of Wilkesport. By the 1860’s, the Wilkes brothers had exhausted the potential for lumber on their land and left the county. However, the other community members remained there, farming the open land that had once been thickly forested. Lambton County is notoriously flat and wet. It was once known as the Great Enniskellan Swamp. In fact, people didn’t bother venturing into the swamps until oil was discovered, because they had no reason to do so. The wetness acted as a barrier to agriculture, settlement, and transportation. It also led to swamp fever and malaria.

The town of Oil Springs experienced an enormous influx in population during the oil boom. However, it did not become a civilized city like nearby London or Hamilton. It was more akin to an old west frontier town. It was dirty, covered in oil and grease, and smelled of oil. People began coming from further and further away to cash in on the oil.John Henry Fairbank first came to Oil Springs as a surveyer in 1861. He fell in love with the area and put all his savings into drilling for oil. He is often credited with inventing the jerker line system, a more economically effiecient method of drilling. This allowed for an entire field of wells to be produced from a centrally located power source.

As early as 1875, people began to travel to Grand Bend from London and Detroit via rail and stagecoach. Enough of an effort had to be put in that people stayed in Grand Bend for weeks, sometimes months, before heading back to the dulldrum of their everyday lives. Ford picnics began to occur regulary, the only criteria being that you needed a Ford vehicle to attend. Sometimes as many as 16,000 people attended. Festivities lasted for entire weekends. The 1920’s brought the establishment of the Lakeview Casino, and many of the world’s top entertainment acts to Grand Bend. Stars like Rudy Vali, Louis Armstrong, and Guy Lombardo played there. In 1957, the Government of Canada purchased the land now known as Pinery Provincial Park, reserving it for public use. The park planners came to the park, saw the open appearance of the forest and deemed it degraded from fire and logging. They planted about three and a half million pine trees on the land. What they didn’t realize was that the local forest type was Oak Savannah, which they had effectively turned into thick pine forest.

TSarnia’s success stems from its status as a central transportation hub. It acts as a stop-over point between Canadian and American cities. Long ago, it was a trading place for the Native people of the area. The first shipping company to prosper in Sarnia was owned by the Beatty’s. The Beatty boats played an important role in the opening up of the Canadian West. Companies were also able to send products via rail to Sarnia, where they could be transferred to boats and shipped across the Great Lakes. Ferries also took railcars across the water. It was decided that a tunnel had to be made for travel across the river. The St. Clair tunnel was approximately two storeys high and went under the St. Clair River. Because of the suction caused when steam trains were leaving the tunnel, sometimes connectors between railcars broke. This caused three substantial accidents, totalling ten deaths between them, one of which was that of a superintendent. It was clear that an electric engine had to be implemented.

Just before the decline in Oil Springs hit, J. H. Fairbank sold his property in Oil Springs and bought up land in Petrolia. He had impeccable timing. When the boom hit Petrolia, he already had a store there. Eventually, he owned about a quarter of the businesses in the town. Richard Bradley introduced a new idea to Petrolia: that of using nitroglycerin to shake up the oil beneath the surface. After mixed success carting the nitro in from the United States, Bradley decide to build a nitroglycerin plant in Petrolia. Several more sprang up, although they eventually all exploded. Because of the explosions and fires, the town passed a law that all buildings were to be made of brick.

In the early 1850’s, Alexander Murray travelled to the Enniskellen Swamp to find the source of some petroleum that he had acquired. He returned to his home in Woodstock, where it is likely that word of oil in the swamp spread to one Charles Tripp, a treasure hunter of sorts. Tripp went to Enniskellan Township to find oil. He discovered a gumbed and by heating a piece of it, made it into asphault, a sample of which was sent to the Paris International Expo. As a result, it is said that Louis Bonaparte ordered enough asphault to pave the streets of Paris. Tripp and carriage maker James Miller Williams later went digging for crude oil. In 1858, Williams dug the North America’s first commercial oil well. It was in 1862 at Oil Springs that “Crazy” Hugh Nixon Shaw drilled deeper than anyone before.

The museums of Lambton County’s Oil Heritage District reflect on the emergence of the oil industry and the technology that spread across the world. They also connect Lambton’s history with the rise of industrialization and the introduction of the automobile.The once world-class oil facilities at Oil Springs and Petrolia have now become old and the resources depleted. Chemical Valley, on the other hand, has a fairly bright economic future. It is connected by pipeline to Canada’s western resources. The west still has vast supplies of crude oil and natural gas, although as Fairbank suggests, this will not last for long. The other future for Lambton’s oil industry is tourism. Even if the future for oil production is declining, the future for tourism in the county is becoming more important and more substantial all the time. The history of the county is quite important to Canada’s history as a whole, despite its relatively unknown status.

Another attempt at a community similar to those of Robert Owen was later attempted in Lambton County: the Petworth Settlement at Warwick. However, this one did not rely on Socialism to the same extent. Settlers owned their own land and homes, but worked cooperatively as a community. Warwick was connected to the river via the Egremont Road. Lord Egremont made efforts to facilitate immigration to the New World, alleviating the economic stress facing England. He built the Egremont Road, which gave the first real access to the interior, allowing settlements, like the one at Warwick, to prosper. In 1833, a group of settlers from Petworth came to the area called “The Rapids,” now known as Sarnia. Henry Jones saw the potential in The Rapids and after the burning of Maxwell, he took up permanent residence there. Malcolm Cameron, an astute businessman, arrived in 1834. Cameron, Durand, and Vidal became the main economic force in early Sarnia. They were merchants, millers, and they fostered the ship-building trade. Cameron was involved in some decidedly unsavoury business transactions, one that involved taking land from the Native people.

Chemical Valley came to prominence during the Second World War. Supplies of rubber from the Far East were cut off, and so quantities for making airplanes and trucks were running out. A new synthetic rubber plant was built in Sarnia to combat the lack of imported natural rubber. Sarnia was chosen for both its proximity to Imperial Oil and its status as a transportation hub to the United States, despite being far enough inland that it was not a target of Nazi submarines. It is widely theorized that without the rubber plant in Sarnia, the Allies may not have been as successful in the war. The Goverment of Canada instituted the War Measures Act during World War II. They wanted to take the land at Stony Point to make a military base. The Natives who resided there refused, so instead the goverment ceased the land by force, putting houses on trucks and transporting them to Kettle Point. If the house could not be lifted, it was bulldozed. The Federal Government told the Natives that the land would be returned when the war was over, but this was not the case. The Native men who went off to fight in the war returned to nothing. Their homes were gone, or relocated. To this day, the legal battle over the land at Stony Point still rages on.