By Phil Egan special for The Sarnia Journal
We breeze along the 402 Highway today with exasperation if a construction delay makes our journey longer than an hour. For Sarnia’s early settlers, it was never that easy.
Founding father Malcolm Cameron had built the road to London, but from spring through autumn, it was regularly impassable. The trip to London could consume from as little as fourteen to as many as eighteen hours. In winter, the roads were frozen but snow clogged passages and storms made the journey a tortuous challenge. You travelled by stagecoach, or in your own carriage.
Travellers to London seeking to avoid the arduous discomfort of travel by road could also journey by boat to Detroit, cross the Detroit River by ferry, and take the train to London from Windsor. You would travel 170 miles to arrive at a destination only 60 miles from home.
As a result, residents of Port Sarnia in the early 1850s felt somewhat isolated. Newspapers from Toronto would arrive two days after they had been printed. Travel beyond London was an even greater inconvenience.
Elsewhere in Canada West, railroads had been uniting towns and villages in travel, commerce, and community since the 1830s, when the London and Gore Railroad Co. incorporated, later becoming the Great Western Railway. A railroad charter had been granted to the London and Port Sarnia Railway in 1853 for the purpose of finally connecting Sarnia to the growing network of rail lines in the country, but in 1858, the town was still unserved.
That all changed at 6:45 on the morning of December 27, 1858 when a locomotive, a tender, a baggage car and three passenger cars loaded with visitors from London rolled into Sarnia’s new station. The single-story building was located on the waterfront, between Wellington and Cromwell Streets. Sarnia was now connected with other frontier railway lines at Komoka to Niagara Falls and Windsor, as well as London, Toronto and Hamilton.
For the Great Western Railway, the link to Sarnia brought trade and commerce to the St. Clair River, opening up new markets. Citizens were elated. Growth and prosperity were soon to follow in the railroad’s wake.
Sarnia first freight shed had been built in anticipation of the coming of the Great Western. It was 300 feet long by 30 feet wide, built of brick on pile with stone foundations.
In 1859, the Grand Trunk Railway arrived in Point Edward from St. Marys, stimulating even more growth and industry. The following year, 1860, the Great Western built a four-storey elevator on the Sarnia waterfront. This opened the way for the railroad to compete in the thriving grain trade.
December 27, 1858 would prove to be a harbinger of change for Sarnia. The town would begin to shed its image as a sleepy, frontier community. Greater trade would follow, and the Reciprocity Treaty would lead to increased commerce with the United States, river congestion, and, ultimately the call for the engineering triumph of the St. Clair Tunnel.
But it all began the day the railroad came to town.