The sinking of the Titanic cost 1,514 deaths in one of the worst peacetime marine disasters in history. One Sarnia man was among those lost.
Local resident James McCrie was born in 1879, to Matthew and Roxanna McCrie. The McCries were a farming and oil producing family who settled on Lot 2, Concession 14 in Enniskillen Township. Matthew McCrie was a respected citizen and politically active man whose "home [was] the center of a broad and liberal hospitality." (Commemorative Biographical Record of the County of Lambton, J.H. Beers, 1906, p. 125).
James McCrie married Maud Brown on April 14, 1902, and the couple settled at 503 Christina Street North in Sarnia. James worked as an oil operator in Sarnia until late 1910 when he embarked on a journey to Egypt. James was following in the footsteps of many Lambton oil men before him who left Lambton County to drill oil wells and teach drilling techniques in countries around the world including Venezuela, Borneo and Russia. The first crew of "international drillers" left Petrolia in 1874, and a steady stream of Lambton County men traveled around the world for decades to follow. James McCrie left for Egypt in November 1910 and completed an eighteen-month contract. At the end of his contract, he traveled to England, where he communicated with his wife and family for the last time. He sent his wife a letter in the first week of April to let her know he would be staying in England for a week to travel across the Atlantic in the new steamer, the Titanic. McCrie boarded the Titanic in Southampton on April 10, 1912, and did not survive the ship's sinking on April 15.
James's story was not soon forgotten: his father Matthew's obituary, which appeared in the Sarnia Observer on July 4, 1939, closed with these sentences: "A son, James, lost his life with the sinking of the Titanic in 1912. He was an oil driller who was returning home from Egypt at the time."
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