QUERY — D’Aragon ended up in the soup

I am the holder of a 100-share certificate (par value $1 per share) from D’Aragon Mines Limited, dated Aug. 17, 1955. D’Aragon was incorporated under the Ontario Companies Act. The certificate, contersigned and registered by Crown Trust Company, was owned by my great-aunt, and it has since been passed on to me. I am not even sure if proper record keeping has taken place. Anyway, I was hoping you could tell me what has happened to this company, and if these shares hold any value.

Eric Thoms,

Calgary, Alta.

D’Aragon Mines, formed in 1945, was a typical junior exploration company of its time. Headed by a group of promoters and technical people in Toronto and Val d’Or, Que., including one Paul D’Aragon, and listed on the Toronto Stock Exchange, the company held mineral exploration properties from New Brunswick to the Northwest Territories during its life.

At the time your great-aunt bought shares, in August 1955, D’Aragon Mines had an interest in five claim blocks in the Chibougamau area of north-central Quebec. It did some surface exploration on all five blocks, and drilled some holes on two of them, but nothing came of the project.

A year earlier, D’Aragon Mines had been working on a property in the Bathurst camp in northeastern New Brunswick. Over the next 20 years, it held properties in the Sturgeon Lake area in northern Ontario, the Coppermine River area of the Northwest Territories, and all over northwestern Quebec. One modest success came in 1975, when the company vended 17 claims in Brouillan Twp., Que., to Selco Mining, which was assembling a land package around the nearby Selbaie copper-zinc mine.

The two centrepieces of D’Aragon’s assets over those years were a 9-claim property in Bourlamaque Twp., Que., and a 1.6-million-share holding in Chiboug Copper, which had its own interests in the Chibougamau area. The Bourlamaque property was optioned twice: in 1960 East Sullivan Mines, which was producing gold on the adjoining property, did some underground exploration from its existing workings, and in the 1970s another junior, Ducros Mines, optioned the property.

In 1978, D’Aragon Mines reorganized, changing its name to Pennant Resources in a share exchange. Three D’Aragon shares were tradable for one Pennant share. Pennant went into the oil and gas business, where it held a 58% interest in Penn West Petroleum of Calgary, plus partial interests in wells in Alberta, Texas and Oklahoma.

It remained a small player in oil and gas production, mostly in the south-central United States, though it did dabble briefly in mineral exploration during the Hemlo gold rush in 1983 and during the Casa Berardi rush in 1987. The Penn West interest was sold for $6.5 million in 1983, and Penn West is still in the oil business.

But new horizons opened up for Pennant. The burgeoning soup industry beckoned, and in November 1987 Pennant merged with The Great Canadian Soup Co. to become PNR Food Industries Ltd. But PNR’s time in the soup was brief; the Toronto Stock Exchange delisted the company in May 1989, and PNR went bankrupt. Sic transiunt gloriae juridis: so pass the glories of soup.