By Kevin Noonan
Irish immigrants were an invaluable resource for the DuPont Company, a story well documented at Hagley Museum.
It was a unique relationship between a company and a country, and it eventually transformed a city.
In the 19th Century, the DuPont Company was booming, sometimes literally. It was the leading manufacturer of gunpower in America from its mills along the Brandywine River in Wilmington, and that meant occasional explosions and loss of life.
Despite that danger, one group of people became an integral part of those mills — the Irish. DuPont valued their labor so much that it even arranged and paid for passage for many Irishmen to immigrate to America to work for them, and the company didn’t do that with any other country. DuPont also gave many of them free or low-cost housing and other perks such interest-bearing savings accounts and pensions for widows, a necessity in an industry where explosions were an everyday threat.
“Irishmen would come to Northern Delaware to work, and then the company would even pay for their wives and children and in-laws to come here and join them,” says Dr. Margaret M. Mulrooney, who wrote Black Powder, White Lace, a comprehensive history of the Irish and the DuPont mills, which are now part of the Hagley Museum complex.
“DuPont understood that married men would be more stable, which is why they brought their families over, as well,” Mulrooney says. “It was dangerous work and they had to be able to make jobs attractive, even if they were dangerous. And the Irish proved to be excellent workers.”
Mulrooney said DuPont initially hired Frenchmen — the du Ponts immigrated to America from France, so that made sense — but that didn’t work out as planned, and eventually the company discovered the Irish and started to woo them to the New World with competitive salaries and benefits they could have only dreamed about in the old country. Between 1810-1850, more than 1,200 Irish came to Wilmington to work on the banks of the Brandywine, many of them on pre-paid passages arranged by agents hired by DuPont, which became known as “chain migration.”
There was a difference between the DuPont Irish and other Irish who came to America to escape famine and persecution by the British. Most of the Irish who came to DuPont were from the western and northern parts of the country and they weren’t driven to the New World by poverty, but by greater opportunity.
At first, the Irish were hired for mostly unskilled labor. But when DuPont realized that the French weren’t that interested in the highly-paid, but highly-dangerous work in the gunpowder mills, the company decided, as an experiment, to train the Irish for that work and discovered they did well at it. So, DuPont switched gears and started to hire only Irish.
In turn, the Irish were incredibly loyal to the DuPont brand, even though many of them were killed in the line of duty. Research done by Mulrooney — now a professor of History at James Madison University in Harrisonburg, Va. — discovered several horrific explosions. From 1802 until the mills closed in 1921, 228 people were killed. However, the Irish dealt with that in a matter-of-fact manner — if somebody was killed in an explosion, they would simply say that he was “going across the creek.’’
The Irish eventually moved on from the mills and became small business owners and went into other occupations as they moved up the socio-economic ladder. But the mark they left at DuPont and Wilmington is still there today.
“Delaware has a really proud history with their connection to the Irish,” Mulrooney says. “They came here to live and work and their descendants owe them a great debt, because their sacrifices paved the way for future generations to prosper in our state.”
— For more information on the Irish and the DuPont Company, visit Hagley.org
In celebration of Delaware 250, this monthly series will spotlight historic sites unique to our state.
