Canada Post celebrates Canadian energy with new stamps

Canada Post issued a set of two domestic rate stamps dedicated to Canadian industries today. One stamp will feature the Transcanada Pipeline while the other pays tribute to Canada's first commercial oil well.

It was fifty years ago that the mega-task of bringing Alberta's natural gas through this vast country came to be. At one point 5,000 workers were involved in the construction of the over 650,000 tons of pipe laid across 2,200 kilometers Canada has since earned a reputation as a world leader in oil and gas industries, and this symbol of national unity has been deemed "a means as vital for the building up of this east-west continental nation in the twentieth century as the Pacific Railway had been in the nineteenth."

Though the exploration and refinement of oil is now among Canada's most lucrative industries, the country's earliest settlers found the foul-smelling tar more of a bothersome irritant than a treasured resource. Thankfully, what was once seen as oily swampland eventually became recognized as fields of black gold. New York adventurer Charles Nelson Tripp and businessman James Miller Williams of Hamilton Ontario were at the forefront of this industry. Years later, on January 16, 1862, oil literally fell from the sky when Canadian businessman Hugh Nixon Shaw struck Canada's first "gusher." He hit a 62-metre-deep reservoir, the deepest well in Oil Springs, bringing the oil boom to a new level. Oil Springs became known as the City of Grease and also lays claim to have had the first paved road in Canada.