We’ve got the women of the DuPont Company’s night shift dropping by ...

Black and white image of a large group of women in work clothes posing for a photograph on the grounds of the Brandywine Mills

We’ve got the women of the DuPont Company’s night shift dropping by this #WorkerWednesday. The workers in this ca. 1918 film negative would worked 6 ½ hour shifts, from 3pm to 10pm, at the company’s powder yards at Brandywine Mills along the Brandywine Creek near Wilmington, Delaware.

This photograph is part of Hagley Library's collection of DuPont Company Brandywine powder yards and neighboring worker communities' photographs (Accession 2017.226).

This collection of more than 1,200 photographs depicts the landscape and buildings at or near the DuPont explosives manufacturing plants around the Brandywine Creek. Approximately 900 images depict powder yard sites, including the DuPont Experimental Station, either during the mill's final decades of operation or prior to, during, and after excavation and restoration work on the site in the 1950s and 1960s. Most of the remaining images depict the worker communities which surrounded the powder yards.

To view this collection online now, click here. To view more images of workers in the DuPont powder yards during the World War I era, click here.