The city that decided what the twentieth century would be made of.
This is the eleventh profile in The City That…, a series about American cities that invented an industry, led the world in it, and then watched the center move on. We tell their stories plainly and with affection — what they made, what it cost, and what they still are.
The Founding
The Brandywine runs fast in its last miles before it meets the Christina. That was the reason for all of it.
In 1802 a French refugee named Éleuthère Irénée du Pont bought ninety-five acres on the creek above Wilmington for $6,740 and began making gunpowder. He had learned his chemistry from Antoine Lavoisier, who ran the royal powder works before the Revolution took his head. Du Pont thought American powder was bad. He was right. He wrote to Thomas Jefferson about it, and by that spring the government was buying.
The men were Irish first, then French and Italian, living in villages the maps have mostly lost — Squirrel Run, Free Park, Henry Clay. At the gate a man was checked for matches, for liquor, and for metal: metal in his shoes, in his suspenders, in his belt. His shoes were put together with wooden pegs instead of nails, because a nail against a stone could throw a spark, and a spark was the end of everything. Consider that a moment. A man’s own shoes, taken apart and rebuilt so they could not betray him. He walked into the yard in them every morning and home in them every night, and his wife knew what they were for.
She had reason to. Across roughly a hundred and twenty years the yards killed 235 people — 232 men, two women, and one child. The worst came on a March morning in 1818 and killed thirty-four. Du Pont borrowed to pension the widows and carried the debt the rest of his life. People in the villages could tell from the sound which building had gone up. They came out on the porches and counted who walked back up the hill.
The Height
Powder made the family. Chemistry made the century.
In 1902, when the elders wanted to sell, three young cousins — Pierre, Alfred, and T. Coleman — bought the company instead. They moved the headquarters downtown and put a laboratory on the Brandywine — the Experimental Station. Wilmington stopped being a place that made a thing and became a place that worked out what to make next. In 1912 a federal court broke the powder trust apart and cut Hercules and Atlas out of DuPont’s flesh. Both set up in Wilmington. The decree meant to end a monopoly left one small city with three chemical headquarters.
Then came the polymers. Wallace Carothers came down from Harvard in 1928 to run a laboratory with no product to make, which was a strange thing for a company to pay for and the smartest money it ever spent. Neoprene came out of that lab in 1930. On the last day of February in 1935 a chemist named Gerard Berchet made the compound that became nylon. When the country got the stockings, on the fifteenth of May 1940, nearly 800,000 pairs went in a day. Carothers never saw it. He died in a Philadelphia hotel room in April 1937, by his own hand, two days after his forty-first birthday.
And then the thing the city does not put on a poster. In 1942 General Groves asked DuPont to build the plutonium works. The reactors rose in the Washington desert at Hanford, but the drawings came from Wilmington, out of the Nemours Building at Tenth and Orange, where men at drawing tables figured out how to service a building no human being would ever be permitted to enter.
The company took a fee of one dollar and kept no patents. Eight years earlier a Senate committee had spent two years calling the munitions makers merchants of death. The du Ponts had sat in that room answering for the last war, and Walter Carpenter had no intention of answering for this one. So the plutonium for Trinity and for Nagasaki came out of a plant drawn up in downtown Wilmington by a company that charged the country a dollar. In 1950 the government came back for the hydrogen bomb plant. DuPont charged a dollar for that one too.
The Turn
Here the story gets hard to tell straight, because there are too many good explanations and no single one carries the weight.
The easy version is that the chemical industry left town. It did not. DuPont kept growing another thirty years. The company that peaked in Delaware around 1970 was not failing; it was going global, and a global company has no reason to keep its brain in a small city on a small river.
You can blame the nine months in 1968 when the National Guard patrolled a city that had already stopped rioting — the longest occupation of an American city since the Civil War. Or you can look at 1981, when Governor Pierre S. du Pont IV championed the Financial Center Development Act, lifted the state’s ceiling on interest rates, and invited the credit card banks in. A du Pont signed the paper that made Wilmington something other than a chemical town.
I have stopped trying to pick one. What I keep coming back to is smaller: the company outgrew the city, and the city had nothing else ready.
What Was Lost
The numbers are plain. Twenty-five thousand DuPont jobs in Delaware in the early 1970s, seven thousand by 2015. That December, weeks after the Dow merger was announced, it cut seventeen hundred more. Today it is near twenty-seven hundred. It sold the Hotel du Pont after a hundred and four years. It sold the country club. The city’s population peaked at 112,504 in the census of 1940 — the same census year the country lined up for nylon stockings — and it has fallen in every count since.
Here is the part that comforts nobody. Wilmington was not robbed. It made a bargain, and for a long time the bargain was good. DuPont paid well, pensioned its people, housed them, ran the safety programs and the employee councils, and Delawareans called the company Uncle Dupie and expected it to look after them for life. There were organizing drives at Chestnut Run and cases at Newport and Edgemoor, but there was never a great strike here of the kind that made Pittsburgh and Detroit into cities with a will of their own. The labor peace was bought, and it was worth the price to the men who took it. What it cost was a century of civic muscle the city never had to build. Then the company went global, and there was no city underneath it.
Some of what Wilmington gave the country is still being paid for. The chemistry that made Teflon also made PFAS, and Delaware settled with DuPont, Chemours, and Corteva for fifty million dollars in 2021, with twenty-five million more in 2026.
What Remains
Not a ruin. The word gets used too easily about cities like this.
Chemours still keeps its headquarters on Market Street. The Experimental Station still runs on the Brandywine. In November 2025 Qnity Electronics spun out of DuPont onto the New York Stock Exchange and settled in Wilmington, making the materials that go into semiconductors. The city that worked out how to make a stocking out of nothing is working out what a computer chip is made of. And in 1958 a DuPont chemist named Bill Gore quit to make Teflon-insulated wire in his Newark basement; eleven years later his son stretched the stuff into something new, and that is where Gore-Tex comes from.
Go up the creek some morning and stand where the mills are. The stone buildings are low and long and set well apart, one wall left open toward the water so a blast would go out across the creek instead of down the row. The wheel turns. The falls come over the dam the way they came when a Frenchman with a grudge against bad powder bought the ground. Four miles south there is an office building at Tenth and Orange where men drew a machine they would never be allowed to see, and on the far bank a laboratory where a quiet man made a thread out of materials that had never been a plant or an animal and did not live to watch anyone wear it. It is all one story, and a short one. A family found fast water, and the water made powder, and the powder paid for a laboratory, and the laboratory made the century — the stocking and the parachute and the frying pan and the plutonium, every one of them drawn up on tables in a small city most of the country has never had a reason to visit.
Wilmington chemicaled America, and that is worth remembering.
Why Wilmington? It never made most of what it invented — the nylon was spun in Seaford, the Teflon found across the river in New Jersey — but for a century and a half the country’s chemistry was decided on the Brandywine, in three headquarters and one laboratory, and what the century wore, drove, cooked with, and fought with was settled there first.
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Charles C. Jett is an author, civic educator, and Professional Certified Coach based in Chicago. A graduate of the U.S. Naval Academy (Class of 1964) and Harvard Business School, he served during the Cold War aboard the nuclear submarine USS Ray (SSN 653), where his tactical innovations helped inspire Tom Clancy’s Jack Ryan character. He is the author of six books, including Super Nuke!, hosts four podcasts, and writes across his Critical Skills Blog platform on history, leadership, and the health of the American republic. In his writing he employs AI tools in a limited, supporting role for research, occasional image creation, and editing, while the prose and judgment remain entirely his own. He and his wife, Dr. Nancy Church, live and co-host the Chicago Salons at Water Tower Residences.