Delaware’s Industrial Brandywine: a New Digital Exhibit from Hagley

Hagley Museum and Library’s new digital project, “Delaware’s Industrial Brandywine,” tells the story of business along the Brandywine from the seventeenth century to the present. This is the first comprehensive, online guide to industry along the Brandywine. The project currently identifies and explores 112 companies, 19 geographic locations, and 16 industries.

And it’s all online!

Visitors to the exhibit will recognize familiar Delaware names such as Bancroft, Broom, Canby, du Pont, Gilpin, Hollingsworth, Kirk, Pusey, Shipley, and Tatnall and familiar locations such as Alapocas Woods, Augustine, French Street, Kentmere, Rockford, and Rockland. Hagley encourages visitors to the site to comment and citizen historians to share their knowledge of the area. Each page has a place for visitors to provide feedback.

“The goal of this project is to produce a resource for teaching and scholarship,” says Hagley’s Digital Curator Kevin Martin. “In addition, while the project focuses on a specific region, it offers insight into the broad arc of industrial development in the United States from the colonial period to the present.”

The Brandywine Valley was a center of industry and a vital part of Delaware’s economy. The Brandywine River drops 125 feet in elevation from Chadds Ford, Pennsylvania, to Wilmington, Delaware, making it an ideal area for water-powered mills, the driving force in early manufacturing. This was one factor in DuPont Company founder E. I. du Pont’s decision to build gunpowder mills in the Brandywine Valley and why so many other industries also prospered on the Brandywine.

Access to “Delaware’s Industrial Brandywine” is online at http://industrialbrandywine.org.

This project is partially funded by a grant from the Delaware Humanities Forum, a state program of the National Endowment for the Humanities.

The Hagley Library is the nation’s leading business history library, archives, and research center. Current holdings comprise 36,000 linear feet in the Manuscripts and Archives Department, 290,000 printed volumes in the Imprints Department, 2 million visual items in the Pictorial Department, and more than 100,000 digital images and pages in the Digital Archives Department.

Hagley Museum and Library collects, preserves, and interprets the unfolding history of American enterprise. Hagley is located on Route 141 in Wilmington, Delaware. For more information, call (302) 658-2400 weekdays or visit www.hagley.org.

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