Photo: Hugh Nixon Shaw and the Shaw Gusher

Photographer: Barry Swackhamer
Taken: August 12, 2014
Caption: Hugh Nixon Shaw and the Shaw Gusher - 1862
Additional Description: “At about ten o’clock on Friday morning… the ‘oil was struck,’ and it came rushing up with a will … filling the well in fifteen minutes, and shooting up a column of oil some 20 feet into the air… hundreds of barrels of oil were flowing around the well, over the road and into the creek.” - London Free Press, 1862

Shaw’s well was the first “gusher” in Canada, setting off a frenzy of drilling in Oil Springs. By the end of 1862, 1,000 wells were producing 12,000 barrels a day and Oil Springs’ population had rocketed to 3,000.

Captions: (left to right) Shaw drilled his well, instead of digging it, using the “spring-pole: drilling method. — You can try this out for yourself — Step up and down on the wooden treadle. This moves the flexible spring-pole up and down. An iron chisel drill bit, weighing 300-400 pounds, was suspended from the end of the pole to pound through the rock.; Shaw’s well gushed because it hit a porous, gravelly layer saturated with oil and gas under pressure which sent the oil streaming to the treetops.; With no large containers ready to receive the oil, the flow was eventually controlled with a “seed bag packer,” a leather sleeve filled with flax seed that expanded when wet.; The Oil Springs landscape soon sprouted a forest of 1,200 three-pole derricks made of local black ash poles. The derricks were used to lift drill rods, bits and cleaning tools in and out of the wells.
Submitted: October 31, 2014, by Barry Swackhamer of Brentwood, California.
Database Locator Identification Number: p290631
File Size: 3.517 Megabytes

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