A rare collection of shoes dating back to the early 1900s worn by Clara Fairbank-Ranney in Petrolia are now in the Bata Shoe Museum in Toronto.

Clara married Charles Fairbank in 1900 and the Fairbank mansion was her home for 44 years from 1912 to 1956.

The donated two pairs of boots and seven pairs of shoes were from dates shortly after Petrolia peaked as the oil capitol of Canada in the 1890s and had been one of the wealthiest, most cosmopolitan towns in Canada.

“We are so pleased to receive the shoes,” said Susanne Petersen, collections manager for the Bata Shoe Museum. She unpacked the collection and is now cataloguing the shoes which are roughly from the 1910 through the 1930s.

“We’ve never seen anything like the embroidered boots with the turquoise feathers!”

The turquoise feathered shoes are called “carriage shoes” according to Bata Shoe Museum curator Nishi Bassi. She added that a pair of colourful sandals in the donation “are unlike anything else we have in our collection from this time period.”

The Bata Shoe Museum has 13,000 shoes from around the world. Some are over 4,500 years old.

“I am thrilled my grandmother’s shoes will now find a very big audience,” said Charles Fairbank of Oil Springs. “My grandmother, my mother and then, my late sister Sylvia, had been preserving these shoes in boxes and closets for more than 100 years.

“When they fell into my possession, I felt they should be seen. I donated them to the Lambton museums, which in turn, donated them to the Bata Museum.”

“My grandmother’s shoes are not simply fashion items, they are artifacts of Petrolia’s stellar innovation and industry which created wealth. When I was a boy, I chopped wood in the mansion basement for my grandmother’s fireplace. I remember her as a woman of exquisite and expensive tastes.”

Fairbank also donated a number of his grandmother’s dresses, hats and numerous christening gowns which the Oil Museum of Canada in Oil Springs now has. Some of these will go to the Fashion History Museum in Cambridge, Ontario and some items have gone to Missy’s Costume Design in Oil Springs.

After marrying, Charles and Clara Fairbank lived in the yellow VanTuyl house on Warren Avenue then moved with their three sons to the Fairbank mansion in 1912, where Charles’ father, John Henry Fairbank who had been Canada’s largest oil producer, was in ailing health. A fourth son was born in 1915. 

During her 25-year marriage to Charles, they entertained often and lavishly, sometimes using the mansion’s ballroom. As an oil man, local politician, and major in WW I, and very active in Petrolia’s community life, they had many connections. A fashionable woman, Clara had the right shoes for a variety of occasions.

After the 1925 death of her husband, Petrolia’s oil dwindled and Fairbank revenue streams would become drastically reduced. In 1927, she married Leo Ranney, an American geological engineer with 300 patents to his name, and his work took them to frequently to New York. 

Even before the stock market crash of 1929, Clara was cash-strapped and selling properties. She was widowed again in 1950.

Clara was the last Fairbank to live in the mansion, dying in 1956 at the age of 79. At the mansion she had hosted such notables as Guy Lombardo, Lord Lascelles (husband of Princess Mary), Pauline Johnson and Earl Grey. She would live in the mansion for 44 years, longer than any other family member, though she often spent time in their second home near San Louis Obispo, California.