Today's #WorkerWednesday is a real blast! The women in this ca. 1918 photograph are employees of the E.I. du Pont de Nemours & Company's Brandywine Mills, and are taping and sealing tin containers for rings for 3-inch Stokes Trench Mortar for military use in World War I.
This photograph is part of Hagley Library's collection of DuPont Company Brandywine powder yards and neighboring worker communities' photographs (Accession 2017.226).
This collection of more than 1,200 photographs depicts the landscape and buildings at or near the DuPont explosives manufacturing plants along Brandywine Creek near Wilmington, Delaware. Approximately 900 images depict powder yard sites, including the DuPont Experimental Station, either during the mill's final decades of operation or prior to, during, and after excavation and restoration work on the site in the 1950s and 1960s. Most of the remaining images depict the worker communities which surrounded the powder yards. To view this collection online now, click here.