The oil town, in five stories

Oil was struck at Oil Springs, ten minutes south of here, in 1858. It was the first commercial oil well in North America, and within a few years the boom moved north to Petrolia, where the field was bigger and the town grew up around it almost overnight. By the 1870s and 1880s, Petrolia was one of the wealthiest towns per capita in Canada.

The men who learned to drill here did not stay put. Companies around the world hired Petrolia's oilmen for their hard-won expertise, and they carried it to Persia, Sumatra, Russia, Borneo and the Gobi Desert, eighty-seven countries in all. Lambton's oil drillers who travelled overseas became known as the Hard Oilers, and their letters home are part of the town's archive.

You can still see how it was done. Petrolia Discovery keeps a working 1860s-style oil field running on the edge of town, with the wooden jerker-line system that ran dozens of wells from a single engine, and a rig that has been in service since 1903.

Oil wealth needed somewhere to go, and in Petrolia it went into buildings. Victoria Hall, finished in 1889, served as Petrolia's town hall and opera house, with a clock tower you can still use to find your way back to the car. Beginning in 1913, the town's farmers' market operated in a separate market building beside it. Victoria Hall anchors a downtown of Victorian storefronts and gingerbread-trimmed houses that the oil barons built for themselves.

The hall never stopped performing. Victoria Playhouse Petrolia runs a full professional theatre season inside it, an unusual thing for a town this size, and a good reason to plan an evening here with older children.

In 1858 James Miller Williams dug a well at Oil Springs and struck oil. The Oil Museum of Canada now stands on that site, with galleries indoors and the field outside, and it is the clearest way to show a child what the pumpjacks along the county roads are for.

Next door, Fairbank Oil Fields is the world's oldest oil company still in operation, run by four generations of one family and pumping with the wooden jerker-line system devised in the 1860s.

Local lore keeps a "Grey Lady" in one of the grand Victorian houses along Petrolia Line, and a former resident nicknamed Mr. Hirst who is said to linger there still, frock coat and cigar included, in a building that is now a restaurant. Nobody promises you will see either one. Tell the children on the walk back to the car, not before bed.

Oilman John Henry Fairbank, the engineer whose jerker-line system is still pumping wells across the county, built the 22-room mansion Sunnyside in 1890 on the fortune it made him. Locals just as often call it the Fairbank House. It is a private home today, best seen the way most people see it: from the street on a walk down Petrolia Line. In 2018 it stood in as a haunted house on screen, when Guillermo del Toro's horror film Scary Stories to Tell in the Dark shot scenes there.