Thomas Draper and the McMurray Asphaltum and Oil Company

The first entrepreneur to really make paving the focus of commercial exploits in Alberta’s oil sands was Thomas Draper (d. 1962). Draper’s family had been involved in the petroleum industry in Petrolia, Ontario, since the 1860s when his father had established a business manufacturing oil machinery. As the southern Ontario oil fields began to decline, Draper started to consider other opportunities. He remembered a map of northern oil-bearing regions drawn for his father by none other than George Dawson, the Geological Survey of Canada scientist and later director, who had explored the Athabasca region in 1895. With a brother and sister already in Alberta, it was not long before Draper went to investigate the scene himself.

By the time Thomas Draper became interested in the Athabasca oil sands, it was no longer possible to make an outright purchase of land in the area. Even leasing land rights was difficult due

to government interest in the potential source of oil. Conditions of a lease included constructing a plant within eighteen months at a minimum cost of $30,000 as well as operating that plant for at least six continuous months of the year. Draper’s original application was denied, but he responded with characteristic persistence and by the end of 1922 had been granted Tar-sand Lease No. 20.

Draper’s efforts to meet the conditions of his lease were thwarted almost at the start. His first plant burned down in the summer of 1924, but he rebuilt and resumed operations. The focus of Draper’s activities shifted at this time away from extraction and towards mining and shipping, which makes sense given the recent decrease in prices that accompanied an increase in world oil production. Consequently, his lease terms were revised to permit him to ship a specified amount of oil sands in place of operating a plant.

Draper did not simply provide the raw oil sands for others to use; he engaged in his own surfacing work for about a dozen years, receiving contracts to pave roads and sidewalks in towns throughout Alberta and even in Ottawa. In fact, the name he had originally given his company, McMurray Asphaltum & Oil, Limited, might suggest that Draper had always had more faith in paving possibilities than in the likelihood of oil extraction. By the 1930s, however, Draper had to concede that, despite his valiant efforts, paving and surfacing with Alberta’s oil sands was just not a paying proposition. His natural persistence was ultimately trumped by a combination of factors, including widespread economic depression and the cost of freighting the raw material from its remote origin.

Draper returned to the family business in Michigan, where he died in 1962.

Thomas Draper may have abandoned his plant when he returned east, but his pioneering efforts live on in the name “Draper” given to the railway point adjacent to his operation. Originally the northern terminus of the Alberta and Great Waterways Railway and named “Waterways,” it was re-named after “Draper’s place” when the line was extended and the terminus moved west.

Draper, Alberta, is a reminder of the accomplishments of this entrepreneur who built the first experimental extraction plant in the Athabasca area and whose company was the first to market a commercial bitumen product.