The Driving Tour of Metal Sculptures

Any time of year, visitors can take the Fairbank Driving Tour of Sculpture in the comfort of their vehicles and at their own speed.

Before beginning the driving tour, it’s a good idea to first visit the Oil Museum of Canada in Oil Springs to get an overview of the oil history. A new system for the Audio Driving Tour delivers the narrative to your vehicle through your cell phone. The app for it is included in admission to the Oil Museum of Canada and it provides any help you may need with it. The great thing is that it also provides video clips, historic photos and extra info. You can take the driving tour at your own pace.

Sculptures on the tour visually tell the story of how the Lambton County oilmen produced and shipped the crude through many earlier decades. They depict men as they worked and they bring the past to life. Each sculpture is modelled after a real person and they are grouped like actors in a play. Together they make vignettes of men performing specific tasks.

The setting is the authentic oil field that still uses the technology of the 1860s. The “metal men” and six life-sized horses are the surprising folk art creations of Murray Watson, who owns and operates Watson Welding in Watford, Ontario.

Along the tour, you can hop out of your car and check out exhibits and the barn mural. You may want to bring a camera too.

Turn left on to Gum Bed Line

Photo: Willy Waterton

A team of horses wait patiently while crude is unloaded from an 8-barrel wooden tank to an underground tank with a 100-barrel capacity. Garnet Byers, an oil producer, monitors the shipment.

The receiving station was always an easy distance for horses to draw the heavy load. The purity of the oil is measured by taking a sample in a graduated cylinder.

Inside the receiving station, a sculpture of Tom Evoy greets the oil producers. He was the receiving station operator, just like his father had been. Sitting at the desk is Henry Wheeler giving the oil producers a receipt for their oil. Henry started as an oilman at Fairbank Oil in 1917 and continued up until 1970.

The receiving station also has a 5-horsepower motor pump for transferring crude oil to the railway cars. (A tank car sits on the former railway right-of-way just west of the museum.) The rail cars would be loaded and shipped to the station on the 12th Line of Enniskillen Township, north of Petrolia and now called LaSalle Road.

Although the railway to Oil Springs closed in 1960, the receiving station continued to be used by the trucking firm Harold Marcus Ltd. to transport the crude to Imperial Oil in Sarnia. In 1974, the receiving station closed, marking the end of an era. This is the only remaining Imperial Oil receiving station. Fairbank Oil has continually shipped crude to Imperial Oil since 1880.

Photo: Patricia McGee

Originally, the pump in each oil well was powered by an individual steam engine. In 1863, John Henry Fairbank devised the much more economic jerker line system in Oil Springs and it quickly spread throughout the area.

It connected several wells and allowed them to share one central steam engine. When electricity arrived here in 1918, a 5-horsepower motor in the rig replaced steam. This is The James Rig, one of six powerhouses on the property that runs continuously day and night.

Inside the rig, there is a 12-metre belt that loops like a giant rubber band around a bull wheel (2.4 metres in diameter) and the pulley with its motor. As it turns, the bullwheel uses a pinion gear to drive two large spur gears. These gears then turn two cranks, which act like a bicycle pedals, causing the Pitman arms to move back and forth.

From here, the power moves outside to a field wheel where it is shifted horizontally through the jerker line system.

Along Gum Bed Line, the old ways of transporting oil are shown. Oil was loaded from a wooden day tank where the daily production of oil and brine were separated. Using teams of horses, oil was transported to the receiving station. One sculpture shows Irv Henderson hauling an 8-barrel load of oil. Another shows “Bucky” Mitchell loading the oil. Both men were Fairbank Oil employees.

Just for fun, another tank was painted to look like Thomas the Tank Engine to amuse Charlie Fairbank’s two sons when they were small.

The site of this station stop is one of Fairbank Oil’s three spots where the oil is loaded into the tanks of Harold Marcus Trucking and transported to the Imperial Oil refinery in Sarnia. The surrounding woodlands provide a valuable habitat for wildlife and birds, preserving the area’s biodiversity.

When the oil is pumped from the ground, it is not pure oil. It is mixed with a salt water and suspended clays. The oil and the brine are separated in a separating tank. The oil is collected for shipping and the brine goes through a disposal well system and sent underground 137 meters to the porous Detroit River formation in the rock. How much brine? A great deal. For each barrel of oil, there are 99 barrels of brine!

A little further down Gum Bed Line, you ‘ll see the relics of earlier pulling machines. These pulling machines are used for oil well maintenance. They remove parts of the well to see if they need to be repaired or replaced. Up until the 1950s, the pulling machines were powered by teams of horses connected to a three-pole derrick at each well.

There are a handful of historic oil producing families still operating in Oil Springs and the Barnes Family dates back several generations.

The Barnes’ black storage tank on the right holds 350 barrels of crude and this is a loading stop for Harold Marcus Trucking. This tank was made long ago and it was made by riveting pieces of metal. Today, welding has replaced riveting.

In Oil Springs, producing oil has long been a family business. As we turn left on to Gypsie Flats Road, you will see the operations of the Mitchell Brothers, Don Kersey and the former property of the Morningstar brothers.

For many decades this oil field had been operated by Phil Morningstar and his twin brother Paul and other family members before them. It became a parcel of Fairbank Oil in the 1990s.

Long ago, the Pennyslvania system was employed here. It uses flexible steel cable instead of wooden or steel rods in the jerker system. Unlike J.H Fairbank’s jerker system, this one delivers the power in a web pattern with an electric motor an central wheel in its middle.

In the fall of 2007, Charlie Fairbank added three three-pole derricks to the flats where John Shaw hit Canada’s first gusher in 1862. Shaw dug his well to about 21 metres, then, with a spring pole, he bored another 53 metres. The gusher astonished everyone and a vast quantity of oil flowed down Black Creek for four days before the well was brought under control.

This was no ordinary well; it was a Flowing Well. It produced an astonishing 35,000 barrels in 10 months. This is more than Fairbank Oil’s 320 wells produce in an entire year today! Shaw was offered $10,000 for his well and he refused to sell. Atop one of the derricks is Charlie’s brother-in-law, Phil Hein, a former mountain climbing guide.

This is the Bradley Well, which was also an 1862 Flowing Well.

Turn left on to Oil Springs Line and then left again on Duryee Street.

2558 Duryee St.

This much-photographed mural on the barn depicts an early trademark of the VanTuyl and Fairbank Hardware store in Petrolia, established in 1865. It shows a man driving a team of horses pulling an oil wagon and the mural can be seen from the main street of Oil Springs.

Charlie came up with the idea after reading the Joyce Carey novel, The Horse’s Mouth, where a collection of artists and friends assembled to joyfully paint a mural. He decided to gather friends and family to paint this mural together.

Artist Anne Marsh Evans, formerly of Petrolia, converted the hardware store logo into a grid of one-foot squares, sketched the image, and created a “paint by number” wall on the barn. Charlie and friend Vince Lyons set up the grid with string. The scaffolding went up and everyone at the party painted one square.

It was the summer of 1981, exactly 120 years after J.H. Fairbank began Fairbank Oil. When the mural was finished, the gang all sat down to dine on lamb roasted on an open fire.