Industry History | DuPont — The Powder Yards on Brandywine Creek
· 1802
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Industry History | DuPont — The Powder Yards on Brandywine Creek
kevin
People treat DuPont as a Wilmington chemicals ticker that arrived already making nylon and paint.
The first product was black powder.
E. I. du Pont de Nemours and Company was organized in Paris in 1801 and incorporated in the United States in 1802. That year Eleuthère Irénée du Pont bought ninety-five acres on Brandywine Creek, north of Wilmington, from Jacob Broom for 6,740 dollars in 1802 currency.
The tract already had a dam and a mill race.
Construction of Eleutherian Mills began in the summer of 1802. The works started making powder in 1803.
The first recorded sale is dated 16 May 1804.
The site used French powder machinery and a mill plan supplied by the French government. Rolling mills sat along the creek so that an accidental blast would blow out toward the water rather than into the next building.
During the American Civil War the firm sold about four million barrels of powder to the federal government. The Brandywine yards became the largest black-powder works in the United States.
The original mill closed in 1921, after demand for black powder had already given way to other explosives and then to industrial chemistry.
The S&P 500 listing today is DuPont de Nemours, ticker DD.
The founding yards are not a private plant. They are the Hagley Museum and Library, a National Historic Landmark on the same creek.
The 1837 First Office of the DuPont Company still stands on the hill above the race. Visitors reach the powder yard from 200 Hagley Creek Road.
The pin is the mill district, not a modern headquarters tower in downtown Wilmington.
What survives is the mechanism: a refugee chemist bought water power, laid the mills to fail outward, and built a chemicals company on a product that was meant to explode.
Photo: Ukexpat, CC BY-SA, via Wikimedia Commons
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