E.I. du Pont de Nemours & Company is a chemical company more commonly referred to as the DuPont company. The company was established in 1802 by Pierre Samuel du Pont de Nemours and his son Eleuthère Irénée du Pont the company began with the production of gunpowder. The du Pont’s purchased a mill site on the banks of the Brandywine River just North of Wilmington, Delaware. During wartime the company was a major supplier for the United States government. During peacetime, the company marketed their product towards sportsmen and hunters. Throughout the 1900s and 1910s, the company shifted its focus away from gunpowder production and towards chemistry innovations. By 1926 the company officially dissolved the powder production unit, although it had already been inactive for many years.

Walter Magee Annette (1874-1955) was a DuPont Company dynamite salesman, who was based in Birmingham, Alabama. Annette left home around the age of nineteen and worked for seven years at a bank in Pittsburgh. During 1901 he worked for C. R. Johns & Co., a land business at Austin, Tex. After Johns died, he worked for the American Push Button Telephone Company in New York City. Here he was recruited by J. Amory Haskell and he became a dynamite salesman for the Laflin & Rand Powder Co., which by merger later in 1902 became part of E.I. du Pont de Nemours & Company. Annette was based in Birmingham but spent much of his time on the road in the mining districts of Appalachia. During his travels he met Amanda Jane Nuckols of Lexington, Kentucky, whom he married on June 7, 1905. After the court-ordered breakup of DuPont in 1912, Annette went with the Hercules Powder Company. He was New York office manager from 1915 to his retirement in 1945. He died in New York on August 22, 1955.