Finding Aids

Wallace Hume Carothers (1896-1937) was chemist and inventor of Neoprene artificial rubber and Nylon synthetic fiber. He worked as a chemist in E.I. du Pont de Nemours & Company's Fundamental Research Program from 1928 until his death in 1937. This collection contains five interviews conducted in July and August of 1978 with Wallace Carothers’s friends and colleagues. The interviewees primarily share stories and focus on their feelings surrounding Carothers’s personality, work, and suicide.

Wallace Hume Carothers (1896-1937) was a chemist and inventor of Neoprene artificial rubber and Nylon synthetic fiber. He worked as a chemist in E.I. du Pont de Nemours & Company's Fundamental Research Program from 1928 until his death in 1937. The records include the handwritten transcripts of a series of interviews with persons who knew and worked with Carothers, conducted in 1978 and 1979. The interviews were conducted by Adeline Bassett Cook Strange (1917-2004), a teacher, researcher, and volunteer who spent her life dedicated to various charitable projects around Wilmington, Delaware.

Rockland is an unincorporated old mill village in New Castle County, Delaware, and was later surrounded by du Pont family estates. The collection contains twelve edited oral history transcripts by Mary Laird Silvia (1938-2013) with people who lived in Rockland.

Walt Biddle (1925-1995) was a gardener in the household of Louise du Pont Crowninshield (1877-1958) and Francis B. Crowninshield (1869-1950) at Eleutherian Mills in Greenville, Delaware. In his oral history interview transcript, Biddle describes the Crowninshields and life at Eleutherian Mills in the 1940s and 1950s.