In an age when few people traveled beyond the borders of their own home town, the pioneer oil men of Lambton County went out from the wilderness of Southwestern Ontario to discover most of the major oilfields of the world. They were on the Gobi, and in the Arctic, in Iran when it was still Persia, Indonesia, Australia, Russia... 87 countries in all. In the 1920s, Hard Oilers brought home Alberta tar sands to pave the main street of Petrolia.

See the little known story of these amazing men at the PETROLIA DISCOVERY, a one-of-a-kind museum combining history and artifacts from the world's first Oil Industry within the framework of an original and still operational oilfield, established in the 1870s.

The Petrolia Discovery gives to its audiences a deeper appreciation of those Canadian pioneers who struggled to understand and control a resource but were too late to stop it from slipping through their fingers. The visitor will find here the workshop and training ground of a body of men who, 120 years ago, went into the world to found what would become one of the world's biggest industries, but whose story is largely untold or forgotten...

Today, oil is still pumped in the Oil Springs and Petrolia fields by central power plants, some using distinctive jerker rods which reach out to each well just as they did over 100 years ago. The Petrolia Discovery is an operational historic oilfield located on 60 acres of this land in Lambton County's historic Oil Heritage Disctrict, which has been set aside as a living museum and a testament to Canada's oil pioneers. It contains museum-style exhibits, detailing the major historic contributions of these extrordinary men., alongside an ancient but still fully-functional oilfield where the visitor can see crude oil being drawn from the ground before their very eyes, exactly as it was being done in the 1800s.