E.I. du Pont de Nemours & Company is a chemical company that began as a gunpowder manufacturer in 1802. In 1939, the DuPont Company created the Seaford Plant near Seaford, Delaware, to be the world's first nylon plant. Dr. Wallace Hume Carothers (1896-1937) first produced nylon at the DuPont Experimental Station in 1935. After determining that low-cost production was possible, the DuPont Company set out to build a plant to produce its first product--women's nylon hosiery. The 609-acre site near the Nanticoke River was chosen because of its proximity to major markets and raw material supplies, as well as the low tax rates in Sussex County. Built in fourteen months, production started in the plant on December 12, 1939. The town of Seaford soon became known as "The Nylon Capital of the World," and the plant ran twenty-four hours a day. In its first year, the plant produced four million pounds of nylon fiber. Seaford lost many of its first male employees to the war effort, but female workers oversaw the production of nylon for parachutes and B-29 bomber tires.

After World War II, the plant was an important part of the DuPont Company's textile fiber program. One of the production units was converted into a pilot plant in 1948 for "Fiber X," later introduced as Dacron. Nylon used in the carpet industry was developed at the plant in 1958. The Seaford Plant employed 4,600 people during its peak years.

Nylon began to lose its popularity in the 1970s when consumer taste shifted toward other fabrics and styles. Competition increased when other countries began to produce nylon for far less than in the United States. In the mid-1980s, DuPont began downsizing at the plant and, by 2003, sold its synthetic fiber division Invista to Koch Industries, Inc. in a deal that included the Seaford Plant. The building was awarded a National Historic Chemical Landmark by the American Chemical Society in 1995.