Hagley Museum: Powder, Water, and the Birth of an American Dynasty

The stretch of Brandywine Creek you are near right now tells one of the stranger origin stories in American business history. In the early eighteen hundreds, a French immigrant named Eleuthère Irénée du Pont bought a farm and set up a gunpowder mill along the creek's western bank. He had studied chemistry under the great Antoine Lavoisier in Paris. He had watched the French government collapse around him. And when he arrived in America, he noticed something useful: American gunpowder was terrible.

Du Pont purchased the property in eighteen-oh-one for sixty-seven hundred dollars and built his first mills along the water. The Brandywine suited the purpose. It dropped sharply over a short distance, and a series of channels called races directed the flow to water wheels that drove the heavy stone grinders needed to mill black powder. By the end of eighteen-oh-four, the mills had sold thirty-nine thousand pounds of powder. The following year, sales tripled.

The federal government became a steady customer, as did John Jacob Astor's American Fur Company. When the War of eighteen twelve broke out, the DuPont mills on the Brandywine were supplying gunpowder to the United States Army. By the time of the Civil War, they provided somewhere between one third and one half of all the powder the Union used.

But the work was dangerous in ways that are almost impossible to overstate. The Hagley site alone suffered two hundred and eighty-eight explosions over the course of its operation, killing two hundred and twenty-eight people. This is one reason the campus was designed to spread across more than two hundred and thirty-five acres, with individual mill buildings positioned far apart so that a single blast would not trigger a chain reaction and destroy the entire enterprise.

The mills closed in nineteen twenty-one as DuPont pivoted to chemicals and consumer products. Today the site is the Hagley Museum and Library, an open-air industrial campus where you can walk through the restored powder yards, see the water wheels turn, and stand inside the rooms where generations of workers risked their lives to supply an expanding nation with the explosive ingredient it could not do without.