Finding Aids

E.I. du Pont de Nemours & Company is a chemical company more commonly referred to as the DuPont Company. It was organized in Paris in 1801 by Pierre Samuel du Pont de Nemours and his son Eleuthère Irénée du Pont and originally produced gunpowder. The collection consists of a binder containing miscellaneous memoranda and tables describing DuPont's manufacture of ordnance between 1914 and 1919.

The DuPont Company acquired a site on the York River in Virginia on which they planned to build a dynamite plant. The U.S. Government took over the property in 1918 and got the DuPont Company to build a shell loading plant instead. These three panoramic photographs show overall views of the shell loading plant at Penniman, Virginia during World War I.

In 1902 the DuPont Company acquired the Smith Electric Fuze Company and some other properties in the Pompton Lakes, New Jersey area. DuPont continued the manufacture of fuses, blasting caps, and other blasting supplies at the plant, adding a shell plant and other facilities. One panoramic photograph shows an overview of the DuPont Company plant at Pompton Lakes, New Jersey, 1918, and the other is a group portrait of staff, August 25, 1943.

In 1918, the company opened an additional plant in Racine, Wisconsin to increase the production of smokeless powder to meet the growing demand in order to support the war effort. This panoramic photograph shows a group of engineers outside of the plant.

The DuPont Company purchased a site near City Point, Virginia on the James River in 1912 in order to build a dynamite plant located closer to the southern market. The panoramic photographs show exteriors of the plant, views of the workers' housing, the town (including the African American section), and a photograph of the Hopewell China Corporation, a post-war reuse of one of the facilities.

The Hercules Powder Co. was one of companies created from the break up of the E.I. du Pont de Nemours "powder trust" in 1911 as ruled by a U.S. Supreme Court decision. The Laflin and Rand Powder Company, one of the largest gunpowder manufacturers in the nineteenth century, was formed from several predecessor companies, including the Laflin Powder Company and the Smith & Rand Powder Company. This collection consists of a Hercules Powder Company calendar from 1919 and an undated illustration from a company calendar. There are also reproductions of a group of three different display card advertisements for Laflin & Rand Powder Company, probably for point-of-sale or counter display.

The Allentown Non-Freezing Powder Co. built this plant in 1903 to manufacture commercial explosives using its proprietary ingredient, nitrostarch. The panoramic photograph shows employees of the Trojan Chemical Company explosives plant in Seiple, Pennsylvania.

After the U.S. Congress declared war on April 6, 1917, agents of the U.S. government discussed the need for new gunpowder plants with E. I. du Pont de Nemours and Company, a chemical company more commonly known as the DuPont Company. The DuPont Engineering Company was contracted to survey and do preliminary design for an explosives plant on the Kanawha River sixteen miles west of Charleston, West Virginia. This was to be one of three new government plants and was called Explosives Plant "C." This small collection consists of three panoramic photographs of the U.S. Government Explosives Plant "C" in Nitro, West Virginia, taken after the end of World War I.