Ontario Visual Heritage Project: Sarnia-Lambton

Chemical Valley came to prominence during the Second World War. Supplies of rubber from the Far East were cut off, and so quantities for making airplanes and trucks were running out. A new synthetic rubber plant was built in Sarnia to combat the lack of imported natural rubber. Sarnia was chosen for both its proximity to Imperial Oil and its status as a transportation hub to the United States, despite being far enough inland that it was not a target of Nazi submarines. It is widely theorized that without the rubber plant in Sarnia, the Allies may not have been as successful in the war. The Goverment of Canada instituted the War Measures Act during World War II. They wanted to take the land at Stony Point to make a military base. The Natives who resided there refused, so instead the goverment ceased the land by force, putting houses on trucks and transporting them to Kettle Point. If the house could not be lifted, it was bulldozed. The Federal Government told the Natives that the land would be returned when the war was over, but this was not the case. The Native men who went off to fight in the war returned to nothing. Their homes were gone, or relocated. To this day, the legal battle over the land at Stony Point still rages on.

The museums of Lambton County’s Oil Heritage District reflect on the emergence of the oil industry and the technology that spread across the world. They also connect Lambton’s history with the rise of industrialization and the introduction of the automobile.The once world-class oil facilities at Oil Springs and Petrolia have now become old and the resources depleted.

Chemical Valley, on the other hand, has a fairly bright economic future. It is connected by pipeline to Canada’s western resources. The west still has vast supplies of crude oil and natural gas, although as Fairbank suggests, this will not last for long. The other future for Lambton’s oil industry is tourism. Even if the future for oil production is declining, the future for tourism in the county is becoming more important and more substantial all the time. The history of the county is quite important to Canada’s history as a whole, despite its relatively unknown status.