It was exciting to see people Saturday returning in large number to the Oil Museum of Canada grounds in Oil Springs, said the museum’s curator and supervisor.
“We’re just texting each other and saying ‘Look how many people. How many cars,’” said Erin Dee-Richard. “We’re just excited to do things like this again.”
Saturday marked the return of Black Gold Fest, an annual event celebrating the discovery of oil in Oil Springs in 1858. It was paused like many other events amid the COVID-19 pandemic’s first two years.
The festival’s return Saturday included time-period blacksmith and rope-making demonstrations, a theatrical retelling of John Shaw in 1862 discovering the gusher that bears his namefood, music, face-painting, and access to the recently renovated museum, Dee-Richard said.
“The last event we had in 2019, we had about 350 people,” she said, adding hopes were to have about that many attend Saturday.
The 1960-opened museum, a national historic site and non-profit operated by the County of Lambton, was closed for a year for a $1-million renovation before reopening in February.
Among the museum’s artifacts and exhibits was a virtual reality exhibit Saturday that let people experience what it was like going down into a well, Dee-Richard said.
Plans were to go bigger for the museum’s 60th anniversary in 2020, before the COVID-19 pandemic hit, she said.
“Multiple days, car show – that kind of thing.”
But reviving the celebration of local oil history, officials didn’t want to overextend and have another unexpected closure, she said.
“Now we’re just celebrating 60-plus years.”’