Chamberlain's Folly

For nearly 40 years, a gaunt oil derrick rusted on a hilltop east of Edmonton, a landmark known the country round as "Chamberlain's Folly." While digging for water on his farm in 1911, William Chamberlain had hit a pocket of natural gas and got a hunch that there might be oil on his land. He sank his savings in an oil rig, the first rotary drill ever used in Alberta. The money ran out when the well was down 2,000 feet, with no sight of oil. Discouraged, Chamberlain went back to farming.

Although his abandoned oil rig became a joke of his neighbors, Farmer Chamberlain never saw the joke himself. While earning a modest living on his farm, he kept plugging over the years to interest outside investors in the oil prospects of his land. Once in 1936, and again in 1942, oil companies nibbled at options and were on the verge of drilling, but backed out at the last minute. Not until ten months ago, with oil rigs sprouting all over the area, did an Edmonton brokerage firm put up the money to resume the quest.

One day last week an excited farm hand rushed into the Chamberlain farmhouse clutching a bottle of oil. Suspecting a hoax, Mrs. Chamberlain at first accused him of siphoning oil from the farm tractor. But it was no joke; the oil came from a gushing well on the farm, sunk where Chamberlain had drilled in vain 40 years before.

Their belated strike will net the Chamberlains an estimated total of $60,000 in royalties. Another 15 wells, enough to make them millionaires if all come in, can be drilled on their 640-acre farm. But the prospect of wealth failed to excite William Chamberlain, now 81, and his wife, 72. "Excitement is for young folks," Mrs. Chamberlain said wistfully. "What we could have done if the oil well had come in years ago!" Other Albertans pondered, too. The province's roaring oil boom, touched off by discoveries in the Leduc area in 1947, might have got rolling 40 years sooner if anyone else had taken William Chamberlain's hunch seriously.

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