DuPont: A Company Town Built on Top of History
Near Tacoma, Washington
The small city of DuPont carries the name of the company that made it. In nineteen oh six, E. I.
du Pont de Nemours and Company purchased five square miles of Pierce County shoreline and began building an explosives manufacturing plant along with a model village for its workers. By nineteen oh nine, fifty-eight company houses had gone up, along with a hotel, stores, a church, and a school, all owned and operated by the corporation. The village became a town in nineteen twelve with a population made up almost entirely of DuPont employees and their families.
What few visitors notice is that the plant was built on the site of Fort Nisqually, the Hudson's Bay Company's eighteen thirty-three trading post, the earliest European settlement on Puget Sound. The company town eventually closed its plant and the land was redeveloped, but a reconstructed Fort Nisqually still stands nearby.
