Hagley Museum and Gardens

 

Hagley House owned by Dupont family

We headed up the Eastern Seaboard, camping at Elk Neck State Park just a few miles south of the Delaware border. The campsites here are a challenge for trailers because of a narrow road and obstacles. We had to go about 6 feet on the grass to get our trailer in. In the afternoon we headed to Wilmington, DE to visit the Hagley Museum and Gardens. E.I. Dupont and his brother immigrated from France in 1800. They initially planned to settle in the Shenandoah Valley and had formulated nine different business opportunities. The Shenandoah Valley proved too expensive, so they ended up outside Wilmington along the Brandywine River. Their ninth business opportunity proved to be the winner – making gun powder. E.I. was a hunter and found the American-made powder to be of poor quality, so he began mixing his own. The local stone, a blue-colored gneiss was solid building material, and locally they could find the ingredients for the gun powder. The river provided waterpower for the refining and mixing of the powder. He built his house here in 1802, later adding a lean-to on the building to house his offices. Upon his death one of his sons became the owner of the house and the powder mill and modified the house to remove the lean-to and add two wings. That is the house we see today. The gun powder factory was down the hill from the house and continued to manufacture gun powder here until 1921. During that time there were 288 explosions, killing over 100 men. The city grew too close by 1921, so they shut the mill down. It was fascinating to see so much of the original equipment still there. Especially the two 8-ton wheels that were used for mixing the powder. There was a flood last May, and the sluice had been filled with over 50 dump trucks worth of mud. They are hoping to be able to reopen the sluice this summer to demonstrate the mill operating.

Wheels for mixing gun powder