E. I. du Pont and the Mills That Armed a Nation

In the spring of eighteen hundred and two, a thirty-year-old French emigre named Eleuthère Irénée du Pont began building a gunpowder mill on the west bank of the Brandywine Creek, a few miles north of Wilmington. He had trained under Antoine Lavoisier, the founder of modern chemistry, at the French government's royal gunpowder works. He knew exactly what he was doing. E. I. du Pont de Nemours and Company grew into the largest gunpowder supplier to the United States military.

The site on the Brandywine was not chosen at random. Irénée, as his family called him, needed fast water to power his mills, granite ledges to quarry his millstones, and a specific kind of geographic isolation. Gunpowder mills explode. They explode with dismaying frequency, in fact. Irénée built his mills on a narrow ravine with the Brandywine on one side and a steep earthen embankment on the other. When a mill blew up, and many did, the force of the blast was directed outward over the creek and upward into the sky, rather than into neighboring structures. It was one of the earliest examples of industrial blast engineering in America.

The du Pont family lived directly beside their workers, in a row of stone houses along the millrace. When a mill exploded, the family felt it as surely as anyone. Irénée's wife, Sophie, lived with that danger, and workers over the decades were killed in the explosions.

The company that began on the Brandywine became one of the most consequential corporations in American history. By the time of the Civil War, du Pont powder mills were supplying the Union Army with somewhere between a third and a half of its powder. By the twentieth century, E. I. du Pont de Nemours had pivoted from gunpowder to chemistry, inventing or commercializing nylon, neoprene, Teflon, Kevlar, and Lycra. A company born in a Delaware ravine to make black powder for flintlock rifles eventually put synthetic fibers into clothing worn around the world.

The original mills are now part of Hagley Museum and Library, preserved along the Brandywine north of Wilmington. The stone walls still stand. The millrace still runs. On quiet mornings you can hear the creek moving through the old wheel channels, the same sound Irénée du Pont heard every day for thirty years.