Roads, canals, railways, and highways The greatest hindrance to developing pioneer Oxford was its landlocked location, remote from the Great Lakes. Governor Simcoe's vision for the area in the 1790s included planning a government road joining Burlington Bay to the site of a new provincial capital at London, through a government town where the road first reached the Thames River in Oxford township (now Woodstock), and also plans for a canal across Blandford and Blenheim township joining the Thames River to the Grand River, thereby creating an inland water transport route through the whole area from
Detroit to
Brantford (see 1795 and 1800 map views on this page). The canal was never built, and the 'Governor's Road' (today a part of
Dundas Street) could not be used for decades because no bridge was built where it was to cross the Grand River (now Paris, which did not begin to develop as a village until the 1820s). The reality was that pioneer land transportation continued to follow the ancient footpath from Burlington Bay to the Thames River using a river crossing at what became known as Brant's Ford (Brantford) on the Six Nations lands, then down the banks of the Thames River to Detroit. Thomas Ingersoll bore the expense of making the path passable for wagons between Brant's Ford and the Thames River as part of his efforts to develop Oxford township in the mid-1790s. Later government appropriations extended that roadwork all the way down the Thames to Detroit – what was henceforth known as the Detroit Road. Woodstock's merchants gained support to improve the road along a detour taking it to the Vansittart landholdings (Eastwood) along the Governor's Road east of Woodstock, and it was that route which became Highway 53 through Burford and Brantford to
Hamilton. The wisdom of a road link from Burlington Bay (Hamilton) through Brantford into Oxford has been reaffirmed with the completion of Highway 403, which also joins the 401 to the east of Woodstock. The portion which originally led into the centre of Oxford is now a county road named the Old Stage Road. The 401 itself replicates the old Detroit Road. Transportation within Oxford was greatly improved with toll roads and railways planned in the 1830s which were actually built in the 1840s and later. Ingersoll people collaborated with Tillsonburg and points south to construct the Ingersoll and Port Burwell Plank and Gravel Road starting in 1849, which was later extended as a toll road north through Zorra into Perth County. It endures today as Highway 19. Woodstock collaborated with Norwich and Port Dover to build another north–south toll road in the 1850s which was later extended up into Perth County through Tavistock. It endures today as Highway 59. Railways were built criss-crossing Oxford in the 1850s and 1860s, joining Woodstock and Ingersoll to Detroit and
Toronto, as well as joining Woodstock to Stratford and Port Dover and Norwich to Brantford and Port Burwell. An electric street railway joined Woodstock and Ingersoll through Beachville from 1900 to the 1920s, but was replaced by a bus service which succumbed in the 1940s to private automobiles as the preferred mode of travel thereafter. Woodstock has developed a transit system which now operates a fleet of 11 buses six days a week, and charter bus companies have experimented with other local services.
Dairy industry A 2008 summary put Oxford's annual milk production at 60 million gallons from the county's 344 dairy farms, the highest output of any county in Ontario, considered to be enough to supply 3 million people. Farm cash receipts for dairy farming in Oxford in 2016 were more than $223 million. The first two cows were brought into Oxford-on-the-Thames by Thomas Ingersoll in the 1790s, and by 1810 the township was famous for butter and cheese made by farmers' wives for local sale. On some farms this grew to a truly industrial scale, with some in the Ingersoll area producing as much as one hundred pounds a day by the 1830s. The queen of cheesemakers was Lydia Ranney on their family farm just south of Ingersoll, who was creating thousand pound cheeses for prize competitions at provincial expositions by the 1840s.
Wheat, corn and soybeans The first crop which had earning potential for Oxford's pioneers was wheat. In 1852 it was estimated that the county had produced 611,000 bushels, of which 450,000 bushels were exported. When wheat yields fell as a result of soil exhaustion and insect infestations by the 1860s, greater reliance was placed on dairying for butter and cheesemaking. Corn and soybean production now compete with dairying for available farmland, driving up land prices. By 2012, corn was being grown on 158,000 acres, producing 25 million bushels. In the same year, soybeans were grown on 77,000 acres yielding 3.7 million bushels, and wheat was grown on 21,000 acres, yielding 2.1 million bushels. As of 2016, Oxford was growing 7 per cent of the corn produced in Ontario, 4 per cent of the wheat, and 3 per cent of its soybeans, resulting in more than $180 million farm cash receipts.
Poultry and Other Livestock The pioneer scene with a few hens scratching in the yard and a rooster crowing atop a fence rail has long since given way to giant poultry barns. As of 2017, Oxford County is the third highest chicken producer in the province, with 108 farms generating 48 million kilograms of chickens per year (8% of the provincial total). It has 15 turkey farms that raise nearly half a million birds per year (12% of the provincial total). The county's beef farmers raise about 100,000 head per year (6% of the provincial total). Farm cash receipts from these 4 categories of livestock were about $190 million in Oxford in 2016. Efforts in Dorchester Township just to the west of Oxford's boundary by William Reynolds and Seth Putnam were more successful, but production from their saw mills remained on a small scale for many years. A visitor in 1804 described the difficulty faced rafting lumber from those mills down the Thames River nearly 300 kilometres to sell at Detroit – three or four men could deliver 25,000 board feet at a time in this way and bring back goods to sell upon return, but it was a ten- to fourteen-day journey. Export sales were more frequent for potash and pearlash derived from burning timber and boiling the ashes; individual settlers had little wheat to spare in their early years, but plenty of wood ashes that could be boiled and bartered with local merchants in exchange for supplies. Export of sawn lumber eventually became a booming market by the 1840s, increased with the improvement of roads by toll companies, and even more so after the construction of railways through Oxford.
Cheese factories Grist and flour mills, furniture factories, carriage and wagon factories, tanneries and shoe factories, foundries producing farm equipment, and knitting mills were all becoming commonplace in the county by the 1850s, but the real revolution in manufacturing activity came in the 1860s, with the arrival of cheese factories. It is accepted that the first cheese factories in Canada were established in Oxford County, although there is still some controversy about which one was the very first. Officially the title is given to Harvey Farrington for a factory in Norwich township opened in 1864, but it is likely his was preceded by the factory operated by Andes Smith in the same township. To display his accomplishments, Smith manufactured a 4,000 pound cheese, believed to have been the biggest ever made, which was exhibited at the New York State Fair in Utica and then the Provincial Exhibition in Toronto in 1865, but the fate of that monster foretold Smith's doom. In the course of hauling it from the exhibition grounds to the railway station for shipment to England for exhibition and sale, a wheel came off the wagon and the cheese was overturned and broke apart. Smith went bankrupt the following year, and fame passed to Harvey Farrington who had built a co-op factory at which risk was shared. The real coup came when a consortium in Ingersoll manufactured the 7,300 pound "Mammoth Cheese" which was successfully displayed in New York state as well as in England. The success of the Ingersoll venture led to the town becoming the home of the newly created Canadian Dairymen's Association in 1867, and also the cheese export market seat for a throng of cheese factories which quickly went into operation around the county. Cheese factory production in neighbourhood factories surged for the next half century, and millions of pounds of cheese passed through export warehouses in Ingersoll, then later Woodstock as well, but then began to taper off before the First World War and had greatly fallen off by the 1930s. By then Oxford's milk production was being trucked to London and Toronto rather than local cheese factories. The Ingersoll Packing Company, later renamed the Ingersoll Cream Cheese Company, continued a large-scale manufacture for international markets, but by 1956 Maclean's lamented to the whole country that Ingersoll cheese might become a thing of the past. It did by the 1970s. After lying vacant for many years, the Ingersoll cheese factory was reopened in 1999 as Local Dairy producing artisanal cheese, cultured butter, and yogurt. Other artisanal factories such as Gunn's Hill near Woodstock have also taken off, giving a new meaning to Oxford's Cheese Trails tourism promotions. There are currently 5 provincially-licensed factories in Oxford.
Food processing The county's economic development efforts aimed at increasing food processing within Oxford suffered a setback in 2018 with the closing of the Cold Springs Farms turkey processing and feed mill plant at Thamesford, with the loss of 425 jobs. Cold Springs was founded by W. Harvey Beatty (1916–1994), a dynamo who worked around crippling injuries to build an enterprise starting in Thamesford in 1949 that eventually included 60 farms in Ontario. For his business accomplishments and commitment to industry organizations, he was inducted into the Canadian Agriculture Hall of Fame in 1995 and the Ontario Agricultural Hall of Fame in 2018.
Heavy industry Vast portions of Oxford County are underlain with limestone deposits which are ideal for manufacture of lime and cement. A deposit of unusual purity 100 feet deep stretches from Norwich up to Embro through the centre of the county, with potential extraction volumes of 3.5 billion tonnes. Over 3,000 acres of the deposit area has been licensed by the Ontario government for limestone quarrying. The rate of extraction estimated in the 1980s was an average of 600,000 tonnes per year. It is an energy-intensive industry with very high carbon outputs. Research involving Lafarge in England aims to develop products that will use rather than release some of the carbon. Automobile assembly plants in Ingersoll (
CAMI/General Motors) and Woodstock (
Toyota) and related parts manufacturers, warehouses and trucking companies have been a growing part of Oxford County's industrial base since 1985. The Ingersoll assembly plant reached production of its 5 millionth vehicle in May 2018. ==Services==