Reconstructing Petrolia's Imperial Oil Refinery

[Steve]

If you're a fan of Petrolia oil history, like me, you've no doubt come across many photos of Petrolia's oil refineries. The majority of these photos, captioned or not, will likely be of the Imperial Oil refinery. This is simply because Imperial Oil was by far the largest and most important oil refinery Petrolia ever had. Some of the most familiar, almost iconic, images of Petrolia's historic refineries were taken here. There are dozens of these photos; of agitators and barreling houses, of crude oil stills and cooper shops, of paraffin works and tin can manufactories.

We know the plant was located on the north side of town, along Centre St. and bounded by the Blind Line (now Discovery Ln.) at its northern extent. But, what did the refinery as a whole look like? There are very few overview photos of the works. For the most part, we see only isolated photos of individual structures, with very few clues to tell us where they fit into the overall plant. Where were these structures located relative to one another? If we could figure that out, not only could we see the whole refinery as it originally was, but we could begin to discover how a 19th century oil refinery was built and how it operated.

Now, with the acquisition of Petrolia's 1898 fire insurance plan, I have a powerful resource for answering these questions and beginning the process of reconstructing the refinery as it once was.

To the best of my knowledge this has never been attempted before. Anyone with a direct knowledge of the refinery has long since passed. We have to rely on photos and archives now and can only hope that enough was preserved so that history is not lost forever.

It was with this in mind that I began going through my collection of all those familiar photos and looking at the 1898 FIP of the refinery property to see if I could find anything familiar. It didn't take me long to find my first match and I suppose it should have come as no surprise that the first feature I was able to identify on the plan and match with a photo was one of the most published and familiar of all Petrolia oil refinery photos.

Needless to say, I was elated and hooked on finding more. I've now made great progress and will post the results of my discoveries here.

Hope you enjoy...



First up...


1. The Crude Stills

In this screen capture of Google Earth, I've overlaid the FIP of the Imperial refinery onto GE. This allows me to 'fly' around the refinery property any way I want. I can then orient the overlay to approximately recreate the perspective of the original photo, look for clues in the photo and match them to features on the FIP. I've pasted the original photo as an inset on the screen cap...

The photo in the inset shows one of the most frequently photographed features of the Imperial Oil refinery, a 'bench' of crude oil stills. This is one of the most familiar images of the refinery. I have seen at least 5 different photos of these stills, all taken from the same perspective. Until now, I've never been sure where these stills were located. That mystery is now solved.

(click to enlarge)


There will be many more like the above to follow, as I discover and study more refinery photos...

[Steve]

The next structure I was able to identify and locate was the barrel filling house, as well as other nearby structures...

(click to enlarge)

[Steve]

Next up are 3 agitators. These structures are a common subject of old refinery photos, likely due to their unique construction. They were usually 2 or 3 stories high and some were polygonal (usually octagonal or, decagonal). They were usually built of wood, but #1 Refined Oil Agitator was a combination of brick and wood. An earlier photo suggests that #1 Refined Oil Agitator's upper wooden structure was originally an octagonal extention of the brick base, but may have burned and/or been rebuilt square as shown in this photo.

(click to enlarge)

[amboyduke]

Question/opinion...

I model the CASO, 1953. I always wondered why photos of the 1290 or 1291, {locomotives} and their trains never had many tank cars on their consists when either leaving or returning to St. Thomas...?
The odd tank car that would be on the train was, in my opinion, a tank car load destined for one of the fuel dealers on the branch, or an empty returning from said dealers.
Over the years, through reasoning and analytical thinking, I have come to the conclusion that MOST of the tank car freight was carried out on the Oil Springs/Petrolia to Courtright end of the branch.

The operations would have to be something like the following:

Assigned service tank cars would shuttle back and forth between Petrolia and Oil Springs...empties being taken to Oil Springs to be filled with the rather poor quality oil from those oil fields and returned to Petrolia, loaded with the high sulphur crude. At Petrolia they would do a "first stage refining" in that the oil would be pumped into clay settling pits, then pumped into the agitators and refining buildings for a rudimentary, preliminary refining, removing mud, dirt, sludge, paraffin and certain other rudimentary useful products. That would explain why these refineries were in Petrolia and operated until 1952 or so. Then THESE assigned service tank cars would return to Oil Springs for re-filling. This function would be repeated over and over.

THEN, at Petrolia, this residual, first stage refined oil would be re-loaded into other assigned service tank cars and be shuttled away to Courtright Junction to be interchanged with the C. & O. Then shipped to Sarnia, where the final, high end refining would take place. Then the empties would be shuttled back to Courtright and the CASO wold return the empties to Petrolia. This routine would be repeated over and over again.
I can't PROVE this theory, but from all the photos I have seen with trains with 8 to 10 tank cars in the consist running between Courtright and Petrolia, this MUST HAVE BEEN THE CASE.
It would certainly explain the lack of tank cars in the consists leaving and returning to St. Thomas. Deductive reasoning...{?} LOL

The feature I love about this theory is, in my case, it allows me to have a miss-matched bunch of old, funky worn out tank cars with both arch bar and Fox pressed steel trucks, as these cars would never be interchanged and would never leave the branch. They'd just plod along on their daily duties, but their variety adds a great deal of PLAUSIBLE interest to the branch operations.

Any one know whether this theory has merit, or do I have it all wrong?
Amboyduke