William Henry McGarvey

Early life

Originally from Northern Ireland, Edward and Sarah McGarvey emigrated to Canada and settled in Huntingdon, Quebec, in the 1840s, where their first son, William, was born in 1843. In 1857, the family moved to Wyoming, Ontario, where Edward McGarvey set up a general store. The area was a hotbed of early Canadian oil industry activity.

After working for his father, William McGarvey established his own business, "The Mammoth Store", in nearby Petrolia. When Petrolia incorporated in December 1866, McGarvey became its first reeve at the young age of 23, though he resigned on March 5 the following year to concentrate on his business.

On July 10, 1867, he married Helena Jane Weslowski of Mount Clemens, Michigan. They had three children: Nellie (also known as Kate) in 1869, Fred in 1873, and Mamie Helena (also known as May or Memmie) in 1876.

Petroleum magnate

By this time, McGarvey had gotten into the petroleum industry. He had stakes in the notable Deluge Well and 17 other producing oil wells.

He was elected mayor of Petrolia in 1876, and warden of Lambton County in 1879.

In 1880, he met British engineer John Simeon Bergheim, who had traveled to the region to recruit a crew to drill for oil in Germany. The two men became friends and partners. Their first attempt in Hanover, Germany, was unsuccessful, so after a year, they moved on to Galicia in what was then Austria-Hungary.

Using the "pole tool" system of drilling invented in the Petrolia region, they struck their first "gusher" within six months; it produced 30,000 barrels of crude oil a day. Over the next nine years, they drilled 370 wells and fended off or absorbed the hordes of competitors eager to share in the riches. The two men renamed their business the Galician-Karpathian Petroleum Company (Galizisch-Karpathische Petroleum Aktien-Gesellschaft) in either 1885 or 1895. They built a huge refinery in Maryampole which employed 1000 or more under the supervision of McGarvey's son Fred.

By about 1882 or 1884, McGarvey had sent for his family. He eventually purchased a residence in Vienna and a castle near Gorlice. McGarvey became so wealthy and influential that his younger daughter Mamie could marry Count Eberhard Friedrich Alexander Joseph Edward Graf von Zeppelin, a nephew of Count Ferdinand von Zeppelin, in 1895 in Vienna in a lavish wedding attended by the cream of European aristocracy.

Emperor Franz Joseph honoured him at a special ceremony for turning Austria from an importer to an exporter of oil.

McGarvey's wife died in December 1898.

When World War I broke out in 1914, the Russian Army invaded Galicia and destroyed much of what he had built up. He himself was either placed in an Austrian internment camp a pauper or was kept under surveillance at his Vienna home. On his birthday that year, he died of a stroke at the age of 73.