Known today as a founder and prime mover of the Imperial Oil Company, Jacob Englehart (1847-1921), pictured in the inset of this photograph, was only nineteen years old when he arrived in London, Ontario, from New York in 1866. Englehart immediately built a small refinery, which blew up three years later. By the early 1870s he had purchased the Carbon Oil Company's Big Still site in Petrolia and when he opened his Silver Star refinery there in 1879 he could boast both that he owned Canada's biggest refinery and that he controlled his oil from the well to the marketplace. Englehart had been dreaming for some time about an integrated Canada-wide petroleum company and in 1880 he joined with eighteen others to form the Imperial Oil Company which moved its head office, shown here, to Petrolia in 1883. In the month of October, 1884, Imperial Oil produced 12,691 barrels of refined petroleum products under Englehart's leadership and by the following year the company had established a coast-to-coast distribution network. By 1890 it was a multi-million dollar operation.
Courtesy: Imperial Oil Ltd., and Public Archives of Canada (PA-98790)
