DuPont's Powder Works: At Least Two Hundred Twenty-Eight Dead on the Brandywine

There is a graveyard on the grounds of Hagley Museum, tucked against the slope above Brandywine Creek. The headstones belong to the workers who died in explosions at the du Pont gunpowder mills. There are at least two hundred twenty-eight of them, documented across one hundred nineteen years of powder production. Hagley's own research library compiled that number. Some historical estimates run higher.

Eleuthère Irénée du Pont arrived in America in eighteen hundred as a French émigré chemist who had studied in Paris under Antoine Lavoisier, the founder of modern chemistry. He saw in the Brandywine Creek the water power he needed for mills, and in the creek's isolation from the nearest town the safety margin that black powder production requires. He built the first mills in eighteen oh two.

The safety margin was, by modern standards, an architectural fiction. The mills were placed in series along the creek, each one designed with three heavy stone walls and a fourth wall made of lighter timber, directed toward the water. When a mill exploded, and they did explode, the lighter wall blew out over the creek rather than into the adjacent mill. This was considered sound engineering. The workers who lived in the company-owned houses upstream were positioned where the blast directed them.

The powder works supplied the American military through the War of eighteen twelve, the Mexican-American War, and the Civil War. At peak production, the Hagley yard was the largest black-powder manufacturer in the United States. The du Pont family residence sat on the hill above the mills, placed deliberately uphill and upwind.

The mansion is open for tours. So is the graveyard. The Hagley Museum does not hide the deaths; the information is in their own collections, documented in their own archives. The men who are buried there built the company that built the American military. No plaque at the top of the hill names them all.