Travel: Delaware’s Museum With an Explosive Past

Before nylon—and before Lycra, Kevlar, and Teflon—DuPont meant gunpowder. For a hundred years after arriving in America, the du Pont family devoted itself exclusively to the manufacture of explosives. During the 1800s, powder making was a ubiquitous and at times highly lucrative industry across the United States. Few traces of the dangerous, dirty, and essential trade remain, but an important exception is the Hagley Museum and Library, just outside of Wilmington, Delaware, the site of the du Ponts’ first mill and the family’s center of operations for generations.

The du Ponts were aristocrats who were initially sympathetic to the French Revolution but then soured on the continuing turmoil and in 1799 left for America, where the father of the clan, Pierre Samuel du Pont de Nemours, had a friend in Thomas Jefferson. They intended to establish a utopian colony in the Ohio Valley, but they instead fell back on the talents of their youngest son, Eleuthère Irénée, who had studied gunpowder making under the great French chemist Antoine Lavoisier. E.I. found a reliable source of waterpower on Brandywine Creek six miles from Wilmington and set up shop.

Today the 235-acre site of the mill hardly conveys the dirty, noisy industrial atmosphere that long dominated the valley. The grounds are serene, shaded by trees and serenaded by the gurgle of the Brandywine. Yet it was here that workers toiled around the clock during the Civil War to provide the firepower for America’s largest conflagration of the black-powder era. Later they produced even more powder for shaping the canals, railroads, and waterworks that catapulted the country into the modern era.

Powder making was a crucial and cutting-edge industry throughout the century. The du Ponts always employed the most up-to-date methods and kept production centralized to ensure quality, in spite of how hard it was to safely transport the volatile material. Several wagonloads blew up in downtown Wilmington before the city banned its shipment through populated areas.

Danger haunted the trade. Powder makers used massive iron wheels—still on display at the museum—to grind the sulfur, charcoal, and saltpeter into a combustible mixture in batches of up to 600 pounds. A spark meant catastrophe. Visiting Hagley, you can see how the du Ponts housed individual mills in small buildings spaced well apart along the creek. They constructed three walls of thick stone but formed the fourth wall, facing the river, as well as the roof, of light timber. If an explosion occurred, the force of the blast would be released in the direction of the sky and water.

But not always. In 1847 a chain-reaction explosion set off “a shock that seemed so terrific in its nature that I could only compare it to the meeting of heaven and earth,” a du Pont family member wrote. Eighteen workers were killed, and a good part of the plant was leveled. Additional explosions came in spite of every precaution—smoking was strictly forbidden; horses went unshod to prevent sparks.

Gunpowder is still dangerous, and the only trace of it that visitors see is provided by guides who demonstrate how a tiny pinch was set off in a testing device to determine its potency. On special occasions a small mortar, also used as a tester, is employed to demonstrate that a teaspoon of the powder can heave a heavy iron ball the length of a football field.

In spite of the fact that Hagley ranks as one of the most well-preserved early industrial sites in the country, many visitors arrive unaware that the du Ponts first established themselves in the gunpowder trade. “Usually, they come to see the house,” says Dan Muir, deputy director for museum administration. One of the early du Pont family homes, a colonial revival estate, is preserved on a bluff overlooking the mill, and it offers an elegant display of nineteenth-century architecture and decor. It was there that Henry du Pont, E.I.’s parsimonious son, worked rapaciously by candle stubs to build the monopoly known as the Powder Trust. When walking the grounds, he would pick up scattered willow twigs to feed into the charcoal retorts.

Through the end of this year, the Hagley Museum and Library is celebrating its fiftieth anniversary, with an exhibit showing how during the 1950s the abandoned powder mill was transformed into a fully preserved memento of the industrial past. The museum not only illuminates the process of gunpowder making with photographs, models, and artifacts, but also recalls the workers who toiled at the dangerous trade, helping visitors imagine the lives of ordinary people in an extraordinary business.

Over the years, the Hagley has added other elements. The museum owns a large number of patent models, which the U.S. Patent Office required until 1880. The collection constitutes a fascinating display of ingenuity on a Lilliputian scale. The library on the site houses not only DuPont papers but voluminous additional business and corporate archives, preserving records of industry and commerce that too often perish with time.

The end of the gunpowder era was written when the Swedish inventor Alfred Nobel invented dynamite, in the 1860s. Black powder hung on for almost half a century longer, but it was increasingly replaced by modern synthetic explosives. The du Ponts soon leaped into the dynamite business, and by the turn of the century they dominated it. It was their search for ways to use the byproducts of dynamite production that led to their entry into the chemical business. They shut down the Brandywine mill in 1921 and stopped making black powder altogether in 1971. By then one of its few remaining uses was in the manufacture of fireworks.

The Wilmington area offers other historical attractions, many of them with a du Pont connection. Winterthur is the early-twentieth-century estate of Henry Francis du Pont, an avid antiques collector and horticulturist. It has museum-quality furnishings and breathtaking grounds. Nemours, the former 300-acre estate of Alfred I. du Pont, vies with it for opulence and is also open to the public.

The Hagley Museum and Library is open daily through December from 9:30 a.m. to 4:30 p.m. From January through mid-March admission is restricted to weekends and one guided tour each weekday. For information, visit http://www.hagley.lib.de.us or call (302) 658-2400.