DuPont Village Historic District

About this property

The DuPont Village Historic District is a historic district and neighborhood of DuPont, Washington. It is roughly bounded by Brandywine Ave, DuPont Ave, Santa Cruz St, and Penniman St. The village was originally a company town built by the DuPont chemical company to house workers for the nearby dynamite plant. It was listed on the National Register of Historic Places in 1987; the listing included 80 contributing buildings on 43 acres (17 ha). The village is near the area where the original Fort Nisqually once stood. The fort was built by the Hudson's Bay Company in 1833 and operated until 1869, after which the last officer at the fort, Edward Huggins, gained ownership of the land. The Huggins family sold the land to E. I. du Pont de Nemours and Company in 1906. The DuPont company underwent a corporate restructuring and expansion under Pierre S. du Pont beginning in 1903. During this expansion, the company decided to build a new dynamite plant in the Pacific Northwest, spurred by the growth of mining in Alaska, the building of railroads on the West Coast, and the construction of buildings and infrastructure in western cities. The company chose the old Fort Nisqually site as the location of the plant due in part to its proximity to roads, rail lines, and marine shipping lanes. Construction on the plant began in 1908, and the company began building a permanent village to house the plant workers about a mile southeast of the fort site the following year. The first 58 houses in the village were built in 1909, including particularly large houses for the plant superintendent and assistant superintendent. Construction continued over the following decade with six more houses in 1912, six more in 1915, and 33 more in 1916. By 1917, the company town also had two stores as well as a butcher shop, club house, hotel, playground, school, and church. Generally, the size of a worker's house correlated with the position of the worker in the company hierarchy, with most lower-level workers living in smaller houses while workers in management positions at the plant living in larger houses. DuPont named the village streets after important people in the company or other plants run by the company. For example, Brandywine Ave was named after Brandywine Creek in Delaware, the site of DuPont's first gunpowder plant; Santa Cruz street was named after a plant in California; Penniman Ave was named after Russell S. Penniman, chemist and manager of DuPont's west coast operations; and Barksdale Ave was named after Hamilton Barksdale, a company executive who helped select the location for the Pacific Northwest dynamite plant.

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Property data from the National Register of Historic Places, National Park Service (public domain).

Description adapted from Wikipedia under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 International License.

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