Imperial Oil Warehouse

This limestone warehouse at 9 North  Street began operation as the Queen City Oil Co. in 1898. There was considerable controversy in the dailies of the day about its construction! Don McQueen kindly shared his photo of the warehouse, intact and still with a track bumper in December, 1982:

The warehouse is currently being rebuilt by Doornekamp Construction. 

Links:

• A city report on the warehouses is here, 
• An earlier 2013 city report here.
• Originally recognized as a historic place in 1987. 
• An excellent historical report by the Friends of Kingston Inner Harbour is here. Excellent excerpts that provide an interesting historical context for the location, design and operation of this warehouse:

The Canadian Oil Co., better known under the trade name “White Rose”, was formed at Petrolia in 1860. The company was the world’s first integrated oil producer, involved in the production, refining and marketing of petroleum products.The availability of kerosene (paraffin) by rail led to the founding of the Queen City Oil Co. Ltd. in Toronto (the “Queen City”) in 1882 by brothers Samuel and Elias Rogers. Queen City Oil was mainly a wholesaler of kerosene in barrels and tins. The kerosene arrived in rail tank cars at regional warehouses across southern Ontario from refineries in Toronto and Sarnia. It was unloaded at a warehouse’s railway siding and transferred into iron tanks then transferred to barrels and tins in the warehouse. The barrels were sold to retailers that sold it in smaller amounts to homeowners.

In the mid-1890's, cities in Ontario had two common ways of trying to minimize the risk of a fire spreading from one building to another. An Oil Limit restricted the amount of specified flammable liquids that could be in any premises within the limit. A Fire Limit, on the other hand, required buildings in the specified area to be built of fireproof materials such as brick, concrete, stone or metal-covered wood construction. Any premises within the Oil Limit was prohibited from having more than five barrels of kerosene on the premises at any time. The 1883 Fire Limit, within which all buildings had to be built of fireproof materials, was not a problem for the oil companies. The Fire Limit then was a line 30.5 m (100’) south of and parallel to Cataraqui St. from the Great Cataraqui River extended west to Montreal St. When Imperial Oil came to Kingston about 1892, they built their kerosene sheds outside the Oil Limit without protest. 

                            A listing of Fire Limits from the 1908 Fire Insurance Map of Kingston:

Queen City Oil wanted a rail siding and a building large enough to handle kerosene brought in bulk by rail car. The company also wanted convenient access to a wharf or jetty where they could receive and ship product by water. The company tried to get permission to build a stone or brick warehouse on the Grand Trunk Railway spur line as close as possible to navigable water. The specific location they wanted was Lot 40 with frontage on Rideau St. and North St. It was within the Oil Limit. Like Imperial Oil before them, Queen City Oil’s planned location was north of the Fire Limit so the “fire proof” building they wanted was not legally required. But the contents of the building would be contrary to the Oil Limit and that was what they wanted changed. A public meeting, the largest ever held in Kingston City Hall to that point, was held on the evening of Saturday 14 November 1896. The new Oil Limit changes kept the previous west and south boundaries but with two exemptions. The first exempted a triangle of land beginning at the junction of Cataraqui St. and the railway allowances, extending 30.5 m (100’) along both the railway allowances to the south and along Cataraqui St. to the east. There was a pre-existing oil storage building within this triangle. The second exemption was critical for Queen City Oil. This exemption was bounded by a line drawn south from Cataraqui St. to North St., running parallel with and 76.2 m (250’) east of Rideau St. and then west along the centre of North St. Lands west and north of this line were placed outside the Oil Limit. 

The new two-storey warehouse built in 1897-1898 was limestone, 30 m (99’) long x 18 m (59’) wide, with a “fireproof” roof. A small one-storey extension of the building and a very prominent chimney occupied the south end of the structure. Kerosene was pumped out of tank cars (Queen City Oil owned at least six of them and could lease others) and piped into two iron tanks that were located at the north end of the warehouse. Barrelling was done inside the warehouse. Local deliveries to retailers were made at first by horse-drawn wagons and later by motor trucks. The warehouse had a Grand Trunk Railway siding on its east side, where it received petroleum products. It also had an entrance on the west side of the upper level that gave it the street address – 9 North St. It does not appear that there was a proper roadway through the rail yards near the lower level, nor evidence of an external staircase or ramp to connect the levels.

The warehouse was of diminished importance after the Great War. By then petroleum products were increasingly distributed in bulk, rather than in barrels or tins. By 1924, the “Imperial Oil Ltd. Queen City Division” had six oil tanks above the embankment. Two of the tanks were very large. Later, Imperial Oil tankers used a terminal at the entrance to Anglin Bay to discharge their bulk cargo to the tanks behind the warehouse. The pipes and bollards for the terminal are still there. The heating oil and gasoline the tankers brought moved by pipe to eight large tanks on the embankment above the warehouse.

 Other oil companies had terminals and/or warehouses in the area. Rosen Fuels, British American Oil (in what we now call the Bailey Broom Factory) and Canadian Oil (“White Rose”) were all in the area by 1924.

Except for the Bajus Brewery (1835 with various additions until 1861), the Davis Dry Dock (original 1889 and with subsequent reconstructions) and the Woolen Mill (1882 with additions in 1887 and 1890); the Queen City Oil warehouse is the last remaining pre-1900 industrial building left on the west bank of the Great Cataraqui River.

Excerpts above from: https://friendsofinnerharbour.com/9-north-street/ ,written by David Duerkop.

Updates on construction from newspapers of the day. September 4, 1897:

October 2, 1897:

October 28, 1897:

November 22, 1897:

May 4, 1898:

Work was proceeding when we walked the Urban K&P Trail in August, 2018:

Google Earth photos from the report (top) and (below):

Designed by noted Kingston architect William Newlands in 1897, it was mainly used to store kerosene unloaded from boxcars. A large tank farm was located uphill. A 1947 view:

Two spurs served the warehouse with an trackside platform/ramp and nearby unloading equipment for tank cars in the final years of the Hanley Spur.  Note tank  car at extreme right of 1962 view (above). During a 2014 visit:

Apparently the chimney fell down during 2018. Check out this glitzy rendering of the finished product. The unseen-until-now Queen City Oil Company tank at the north end is being constructed in the fall of 2020:

September, 2023 photo showing the Doornekamp Queen City Oil Company project, with roof now on. Apparently, construction is set to resume this fall - currently waiting for Ministry of the Environment to review the Record of Site Condition before obtaining full building permits:

A 1983 newspaper article on the dismantling of the tanks that had not been used since 1976: