The Draper Corporation was once the largest maker of power looms for the textile industry in the United States.

His great-great grandfather, James Draper had landed in Boston from England in 1650, and was "one of the first men in the American colonies to engage in the business of weaving and selling cloth".

Ebenezer, a younger brother, bought the business in 1837, and later moved it from Wayland to Uxbridge, Massachusetts, the center of the growing textile mill area of the Blackstone Valley.

In 1841, Ebenezer moved the company to nearby Hopedale, Massachusetts, where a new Christian settlement had been formed by Adin Ballou in 1841.

A year later he bought an interest in the new Dutcher temple, then made in North Bennington, Vermont that was an improvement on previous models.

By 1887, George Draper owned the patent rights or controlled the sale of 12 named varieties of ring spindles.

[3] Amid a wave of strikes in Massachusetts in 1913, Draper's 2,000 employees walked out on April 1 for a nine-hour day, a 22-cent minimum hourly wage, and the end of piecework.

Focusing on looms for the cotton textile industry, Draper became part of the "Big Three" textile machinery makers in the Blackstone Valley, along with Crompton & Knowles of Worcester, Massachusetts, which focused on looms for wool, and the mighty Whitin Machine Works in nearby Whitinsville, Massachusetts which largely made spinning frames and cotton preparation machinery.

The Draper automatic looms were a significant factor in the movement of the cotton textile industry to the South during this time.

Many Northern mill owners were reluctant, or were so heavily invested in older, outdated equipment that they could not afford to make the switch.

Long after most of the New England mills had closed, Draper continued to improve their products and sell them to the Southern textile companies, and others around the world.