Smoke on the Water

The Hagley Museum in Wilmington, Delaware, is on the site of the DuPont corporation's early powderworks.  I don't know if I ever knew that DuPont started off making explosives, but they sure did.  Today the museum includes a visitors' center, the remains of the powderworks, the village where workers lived, the house where the owners lived, and a research center.

In the visitors' center the history of industrialization along the Brandywine River is introduced, as are different kinds of mills and the materials that could be processed in them, from cotton to paper to wheat.  The second floor of the center was closed so that a recently-closed exhibit could be taken down; the third was dedicated to DuPont's technical innovations.  There's a race car, and a space suit that visitors can take pictures in, and hands-on science exhibits to delight visitors of all ages.

Outside, buses shuttle visitors around the property; some sites, like the research center, are only accessible via bus, but the drivers will generally take you wherever you want to go on the loop.  To see everything on the site would take pretty much all day; we spent about three hours there and didn't even visit the house.  Our first stop was the machine shop, and we were lucky to have it and the docent to ourselves.

The powderworks made use of the Brandywine  to power their machinery.  This was demonstrated to great effect when a docent showed us how opening a sluice gate from the millrace that runs parallel to the river powered a turbine, which could then be used to run all kinds of machinery in the tool shop.  The millrace and machine shop are pictured above; the gear on the wall is connected to the turbine via the rope belt.  The turbine's power turns a central crank that runs the length of the shop, to which every machine is connected; a worker could start a machine up by simply pulling a lever that transferred the central crank's movement to the subsidiary machines.  It was an ingenious use of both the natural resource and the technology of the time.

The powder was ground in roll mills in huts on the banks of the river.  Unlike grains, powder had to be milled using implements with no metal parts to avoid sparking.  The huts themselves were built with three solid walls of thick stone, while the fourth wall, the one facing the river, and the roof were of much flimsier construction.  This was so that when the powder exploded, as it was wont to do, it would blow the front wall and roof off into the river, while the thicker walls at the back and sides protected the rest of the works from the blast.  Another docent demonstrated how powder was tested—basically by blowing up a small amount.

The shuttle bus also takes visitors to see the workers' village.  As at most company towns, workers lived, shopped, and learned in a town built and owned by the company.  The village as it exists now isn't extensive, but we also didn't get out there to walk around.

Since we had a bit of a time limit on our visit we couldn't examine everything in detail.  What we did get to see was unusual and informative, and I'd recommend a visit to Hagley when you're in the Wilmington area.