Petrolia, 1874, Looking North Across Railroad Street.
This photograph, taken from the roof of a store on the main street, shows the north side of Petrolia five years before the first brick building was erected. No activity escaped daily contact with the oil industry. The derricks in the background show how close the oil field was to the town itself. Subsidiary oil field activities surround the church in the centre of the photograph. In other parts of the town where the oilmen and their families lived, it was not uncommon to see a tripod in the backyard. Oil was everywhere in Petrolia.
A local schoolboy, describing his home town in an essay in 1884, wrote:
It has no buildings of any importance, they being for the most part wooden. It also has a very bad smell and visitors coming in are shocked by the smell from the refineries, and a small dirty oily creek called Bear Creek runs through it.
