Delaware

Our planned route for our road trip to the East coast took us close to Delaware. I have never been to Delaware so I thought it would be a good idea to drive through the state and add it to my list of states I’ve been in. When I mentioned this idea to our host the morning we were leaving Washington D.C. heading to Pennsylvania, he suggested we go to the Hagley Museum in Wilmington, Delaware. So we did.

The Visitor’s Center.

The Hagley Museum is along the banks of the Brandywine River and is the site of the gunpowder works founded by E.I. du Pont in 1802. The du Pont company became the largest American manufacturer of black powder.

A side view of the Visitor’s Center and museum.

The Visitor’s Center and museum, in a beautiful brick building, includes three floors of exhibits.

More beautiful and interesting brick building walls.

Outside the museum, there are 235 acres with historic buildings to explore, and tour different parts of the gun powder operation, including the the Powder Yard with live demonstrations.

One of many buildings along the Brandywine River used to manufacture gun powder.

 

A demonstration of gun powder being ignited.

You can walk up to Worker’s Hill where the worker’s lived on site, and tour Eleutherian Mills, which was the first du Pont family home.

The du Pont’s first family home. – both ends have been added on since the original was built.

I especially like touring older homes…like the Rockefeller’s in Williamsburg, and now the du Pont home in Wilmington. This was du Pont’s first home in America (they immigrated to America from France)…a few miles away is Winterthur, another du Pont home where the family lived, with 175 rooms. It is now open to the public but we didn’t have time to go see it. (Maybe another trip to Delaware – who knew there were such interesting places to visit in Delaware?)

I liked this wrought iron bench painted turquoise, and the yellow pansies and the lamppost at the entrance to the house.

The du Pont company went on to become the country’s largest chemical firm. The exhibits in the museum showed many examples of their inventions: nylon (including nylon stockings), Teflon, Kevlar to name a (very) few but there are so many more.

We enjoyed this museum a lot and I said to Gary, “It’s interesting that this morning we never even heard of this place and now, here we are this afternoon, touring it and enjoying it.”

O, the joys of travel.

3 thoughts on “Delaware”

    1. I, too, love the brick and stone houses in the area…It’s always a treat to drive around and see old, beautiful houses, barns, fences, buildings.

  2. Wow, what a beautiful place, Valerie. There is no end of interesting places and life stories to see and to learn. Life is a never-ending, fascinating offering of wonder, isn’t it?

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