Oil Springs, Ontario

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Oil Springs, Ontario (population, 800) is a village located along Former Kings Highway 21 in Lambton County, Ontario, south of Oil City. The village is home to the Oil Museum of Canada.

Oil Springs, originally called Black Creek, became the site of North America's first commercial oil well when asphalt producer James Miller Williams set out to dig a water well in 1858 and found free oil instead.^[1]^[2]

Williams' discovery triggered North America's first oil rush. Within a few years, Black Creek was a bustling town of four thousand. The town's name was changed to Oil Springs and in its peak days boasted paved roads, horse-drawn buses and street lamps.

In 1862 Hugh Nixon Shaw using a springboard to to chip through rock, created the first oil gusher. The Shaw well is located on Gypsy Flats Road.

A surveyor turned oil man named John Henry Fairbank invented the jerker line, a method used to pump oil to the surface from multiple wells using a shared steam engine. Jerker lines are still used to pump oil in Oil Springs today.

In 1865, Bernard King struck oil at Petrolia, eleven kilometres north of Oil Springs. Petrolia quickly replaced Oil Springs as Canada's oil capital.

The CKCO-3 Channel 42 Television Tower is located near Oil Springs. It's the fifth tallest guyed antenna in Canada at 994 feet (303 m).