Early life of Oil Springs made into movie
Historical docudrama third instalment of director’s Heroes and Outlaws series
More than a century and a half ago, a small town in Southwestern Ontario called Black Creek became home of one of the most lucrative episodes in Canadian history. Now called Oil Springs, the town serves as a setting for local director Aaron Huggett’s third historical docudrama. Black Gold drills into the lives of five oil pioneers, including James Miller Williams and John Henry Fairbank, famous for striking oil in the Lambton County town.
It’s a change in pace for Huggett, whose first two movies focused on the notorious criminal Norman (Red) Ryan and the Black Donnellys massacre in Lucan, near London. Black Gold will be the third in his Heroes and Outlaws anthology. Though less sensational, Huggett said, the people portrayed in his newest movie are just as compelling.
“There’s a couple of aspects to it that are still pretty gritty,” Huggett said. “One of them is … there was a race riot in Oil Springs, in the oil fields. Some accounts put up to hundreds of people (there), involved in this race riot. I think that’s an exaggeration, but we know that it happened.
“The story of those early black settlers wasn’t told.”
The movie focuses on the creation of Oil Springs, home to an oil rush in the early 1860s that saw some 4,000 people take up residence in the area. Huggett explores the lives of five of those people and how their paths all led to North America’s first oil rush.
The movie was shot on location with scenes from modern tourism hot spots like the Oil Museum of Canada and Uncle Tom’s Cabin, in Dresden, where preacher Josiah Henson settled fugitive slaves during the mid-1800s. “Josiah Henson was such an iconic Canadian figure,” Huggett said. “And yet he’s hardly mentioned in film or television.” There are other locally famous characters too, like Williams and Fairbank.
Many people near Oil Springs are descended from people depicted in the movie, such as Charlie Fairbank, who last month was awarded the Martin E. Weaver Award at the annual conference of the Association for Preservation Technology. Those well-known perspectives are hardly the only ones emphasized during the film.
“It was very different outcomes for different people. Everyone was coming from such distinct backgrounds,” Huggett said. “It’s a difficult life. Not everyone makes it out. We start with more characters than we end with.”
The movie Black Gold will run as a double feature with Black Donnellys in early 2019. The 11-stop tour starts at the Imperial Theatre in Sarnia Jan. 19 and continues through Southwestern Ontario with stops in Petrolia, London, Chatham, and Stratford. There will be a special showing in Toronto at the Royal Theatre Feb. 23.