The Saga of the Foreign Drillers

Out from Petrolia they went, these pioneer Canadian oilmen, to open the oil fields of the world before the turn of the century. What would soon become the world's largest industry had its seat in a little Ontario town. This little town in a remote corner of Upper Canada was built from oil...not only from the fields around it, but oil from around the world. Petrolia, for several generations after the discovery of the first commercial oil well at Oil Springs, in 1858, was at the centre of the world's petroleum industry.

Out of Petrolia went the men, the methods, and the tools of the new petroleum technology, to open nearly every major oil field in the world before the turn of the century. At any one time there were hundreds of them, and they left home and family to spend years in the deserts and jungles of exotic lands that most young men of the period could only dream about.

The first crew left Petrola, in May of 1874, for Java. They went to explore a field owned by a company from England. The whole town paraded with them to the railway station, apparently sensing the historic significance of the event. They took with them the locally made pole drilling tools, for which Petrolia oilmen became famous.

The industry was 40 years from accepting geology as a valid science, and men who could drill straight down to the oil without losing the well, were a gift from god. Canadian "hard oilers" became famous around 1879. John Sinclair was hired by Count Carlo Ribighini to work in Italy. Sinclair sent ten men, most of whom returned home after three years, but his brother, Neil, stayed to work with William H. McGarvey and remained in Europe until the early nineteen hundreds.

John Simeon Bergheim, a British engineer from London, England arrived in Southwestern Ontario looking for drillers to work the fields in Oelheim, Germany. He had been directed here, as American drillers were unavailable. He met William H. McGarvey in 1881 and they soon became friends, and eventually business partners.

McGarvey, Bergheim, and a handful of workers left for Germany in an unsuccessful attempt to find oil. In Germany, they heard stories of oil deposits in Galicia, which was further east. They travelled to Galicia and finally discovered oil. "Canadian Hard Oilers began to develop a reputation as first rate drillers largely thanks to the exploits of W.H. McGarvey's crews in Europe." (Gay May, Hard Oiler!, p.127) Soon others were off to places in Europe, and the effect on Petrolia was immediate. Businesses like the Oil Well Supply began shipping drills and rigs around the world.

This was a single-parent family town, before the term was invented. Entire streets were without fathers, inhabited only by women and children. The drillers sent their wages to the Little Red Bank, in Petrolia. Once a month, mothers lined before the wickets for allowances many times what their husbands might have earned at home. But for most wives, these years were a lonely time.

A few men never returned, dead of a knife in the night, or a tropical illness. Others married and settled in some foreign land. The Advertiser-Topic lost its last Borneo subscriber in 1962, when the Petrolia driller died.

The age of the foreign driller reached its zenith around World War I, and began its decline as the Petrolia fields began to expire. Oil drilling technology rapidly changed drilling techniques, and the foreign driller slowly faded into the past.

Click here to read some foreign driller stories.