Harry Fletcher Brown, Delaware's Quiet Benefactor
Near Wilmington, Delaware
This honors Harry Fletcher Brown, a Wilmington chemist whose generosity reshaped Delaware. Brown rose to become an executive at the DuPont Company. During the First World War his chemical work was credited by some as vital to the Allied victory.
After retiring in nineteen thirty, he turned to giving his fortune away. He funded a chemistry building, a dormitory, and an endowed professorship at the University of Delaware. He paid for a new wing of the Delaware Art Museum and supported the libraries, the hospital, and the city's young people's associations. He endowed a vocational school in Wilmington that still bears his name.
When he died, Brown left millions of dollars in bequests, many of them benefiting public institutions. It was one of the great philanthropic legacies in Delaware history.
