We've been seeing a lot of back to school photos in our personal social media feeds, and decided to participate in the trend. No kids? No problem! Our collections are our babies! Today's Hagley Vault photo features a ca. 1900 image of three students of Wilmington, Delaware's Alexis I. du Pont School; Alfred Mathewson, left, and siblings Annie and Fred Evans.
This photograph is part of Hagley Library's collection of Brandywine Valley oral history interviewees' photographs (Accession: 2017.225). Between 1954 and 1990, Hagley Museum staff conducted a series oral history interviews with individuals who had worked at the DuPont Company powder yards on Brandywine Creek during the yards’ final decades of operation, or who had lived near the yards as spouses or children of DuPont Co. workers.
Some of the individuals who were interviewed donated, lent for copying, or provided information on the photographs in this collection. The images primarily depict the worker communities which surrounded the E.I. du Pont de Nemours & Company powder yards on Brandywine Creek or the powder yards themselves. To view the collection online now in our Digital Archive, click here. Click here to view and listen to the collection of oral histories on work and daily life in the Brandywine Valley that accompanies these images.