It's shaping up to be a beautiful day on the grounds of Hagley Museum and Library. While some of us may be stuck inside today, here are some locals with the right idea. This photograph of people canoeing and swimming in the Brandywine Creek is undated, but was probably taken between 1890 and 1920.
It is part of our collection of DuPont Company Brandywine powder yards and neighboring worker communities' photographs (Accession 2017.226), which contains over 1,250 images from original photographs, copy work from other Hagley Museum & Library collections, and items loaned for copy to Hagley Museum & Library from various individuals. These photographs document the landscape and buildings at or near the DuPont explosives manufacturing plants along Brandywine Creek near Wilmington, Delaware.
The workers' villages along Brandywine Creek grew up in tandem with the powder mills and other nearby mills, and they were populated largely by Irish, French, and Italian immigrants and their descendants. By the 1890s, several distinguishable neighborhoods existed near the powder yards, which supported stores, saloons, churches, schools, and other community resources. Many of the images in this collection also depict powder yard sites, including the DuPont Experimental Station, either during the mills' final decades of operation or prior to, during, and after excavation and restoration work on the site in the 1950s and 1960s.
To view this collection online now in our Digital Archives, just click here.