Synopsis courtesy of Shell (2015) Shell’s Sarnia Manufacturing Centre is located on the St. Clair Parkway, about ten kilometres south of Sarnia between Froomfield and Corunna. The plant employees 350 full-time employees and has a capacity of 75,000 barrels of crude oil daily. Its products include gasoline, distillates, liquid petroleum [...]
2014 by Glenn Ogilvie for The Sarnia Journal THEN Hundreds of milling residents can be seen surveying the wreckage in this aerial photo, taken May 21, 1953, just hours after a powerful tornado ripped through Sarnia’s downtown. The twister damaged 250 buildings, left dozen of families homeless and caused $5-million [...]
by Brian Bolt for the Sarnia (2001) In its glory days in the late 1800s, the former Belchamber Hotel building was a downtown Sarnia landmark reputed to be one of the finest hotels in Ontario. Today, while the historic four-storey building at 178 Front St. N. isn’t about to revisit [...]
By Jean Elford for the Sarnia Gazette (1961) Everyone familiar with downtown Sarnia refers to building number 176 on the east side of Front Street south of Lochiel as the Belchamber. It has been called that ever since James Belchamber had it built as a hotel in 1866. The name [...]
by the Sarnia Gazette (1978) In 1880, there were about 6,000 people living in the Town of Sarnia which was described as a thriving railway and shipping centre having an extensive waterworks and sewerage system, a horse-drawn street railway between Sarnia and Point Edward, a number of industries, including a [...]
by George Mathewson for The Sarnia Journal (2014) It’s been climbed on, posed beside and rendezvoused at by half the people in Sarnia at one time or another. But the origins of the cannon in Canatara Park, and how it got there, have long been a mystery. Now, two men [...]
by R.W. Ford (1987) Stretching for over 30 kilometres along the St. Clair River from the southern tip of Lake Huron to the village of Sombra lies the largest concentration of petroleum and chemical industry in Canada. Some 25 kilometres inland ancient oil wells grudgingly yield a few barrels of [...]
By Dan McCaffery for the Sarnia Observer He paved the way for a Sarnia General Hospital expansion and had a hand in the creation of Lambton College. But Mayor Iven Walker is probably best remembered as the man who brought the Queen to Canatara Park. Born in Petrolia in 1898, [...]
By Dan McCaffery for the Sarnia Observer Mayor Marshall Murphy Gowland was a man ahead of his time. A generation before Sarnia Council began debating the wisdom of building a multi-use complex, Mayor Gowland was advocating the establishment of a new civic centre. Born in Milton in 1913, Gowland studied [...]
By Dan McCaffery for the Sarnia Observer He built modern Sarnia. Those four words probably best sum up the achievements of William C. Nelson, the City's 59th – and longest serving – Mayor at that point in time. Born in 1885, he attended Durand Street School and Sarnia Business College. [...]
