Daily AncestorDraper
A draper sold cloth, mainly for making clothes, by retail or wholesale; the word is chiefly British, where Americans spoke of a dry goods merchant.
Drapers formed an important trade guild in the Middle Ages, selling cloth from drapers' shops, and a draper might also deal as a cloth merchant or haberdasher. The original meaning has largely fallen out of use.
In the United States a store selling cloth and clothing was usually called a dry goods store. The British trade is the same one.
As seen in a recordOccupation column of the 1850 to 1900 census
Alexr. Gow, 41, Draper, Scotland
How to cite this page
Daily Ancestor. "Draper." Dictionary of Old Record Words. https://dailyancestor.com/dictionary/occupations/draper. Last checked 2026-10-10.