Originally uploaded by son.delorian.
Delaware has been good for business ever since Éleuthère Irénée du Pont de Nemours fled the French Revolution and built his gunpowder mills along Wilmington’s Brandywine Creek 200 years ago. The mill was the start of the DuPont Company, the city’s major private employer for generations.
That role is now played by MBNA, a giant in the credit card industry, which moved to Delaware in the 1980s to take advantage of the state’s favorable banking laws. Consumer debt has become an American way of life, one that many find addictive. Wilmingtonians themselves aren’t immune to credit card debt.
Location, location, location. Where Wilmington sits on the eastern seaboard may not be so important in this age of virtual commerce, however, geography played a vital role in the 18th-century development of the city. At that time, waterpower was one of the prime sources of energy for driving the machinery of industry, and Wilmington’s river, Brandywine Creek, was the largest of several streams in the northern part of Delaware capable of being harnessed for power.
Brandywine Creek flows from its source in Pennsylvania, joins the Christina River at Wilmington, and together they empty into the Delaware River. Along this route, Brandywine Creek crosses the fall line—the intersection of the Piedmont (foothills) of the Appalachian Mountains and the Coastal Plain. Where these two geologies meet rapids and waterfalls are common, and Wilmington lies within this zone: In the four-mile (six-kilometer) reach behind Market Street Bridge in Wilmington, Brandywine Creek’s elevation drops 120 feet (40 meters).
As many as 130 mills were constructed along the river. The mills powered their machinery by diverting water into raceways and directing the flow over waterwheels before returning it to the river below. The mills that helped turn Wilmington into the largest city in Delaware made flour, paper, textiles, and, in the early 19th century, gunpowder. As steam supplanted waterpower and other industries replaced mills, Wilmington continued to be a manufacturing center and owes a measure of its industrial history to its geography.
—M. Reese Madrid