Powder Mill Explosion
Across the Creek: The Human Cost of America’s Industrial Power, Told at Hagley
On July 23, 2026, from 6 to 7:30 p.m., Hagley Library hosts an evening program that approaches America’s industrial history from an angle most celebrations overlook entirely — the lives lost in the course of building it. Across the Creek: Black Powder Explosions on the Brandywine is both a book and an evening program by Hagley’s own Richard Templeton, drawing on the museum’s extensive archival collections to tell the personal stories behind the explosions that periodically devastated the du Pont powder yards over 120 years of operation.
The Book and the Story
Richard Templeton’s Across the Creek examines the explosions at the Hagley powder yards from the early 1800s through the early 20th century, when the DuPont black powder works was the primary gunpowder supplier to the United States military. The Brandywine Creek — which powered the mills through a system of raceways — also served as a natural boundary between the powder yards and the du Pont family residence. Workers lived and labored on one side. The family lived on the other.
When the powder mills exploded — and they did, with terrible regularity — it was the workers who died. Templeton’s research pulls these individuals out of the historical anonymity that typically swallows industrial accident victims, restoring their names, their family circumstances, and the specific details of what happened to them.
Why “America’s Industrial Power” Belongs in the America 250 Conversation
The standard America 250 narrative celebrates innovation, enterprise, and the industrial power that transformed a young republic into a world power. All of that is true and worth celebrating. But the workers who made it possible — many of them Irish and French immigrants, many of them young men and women with families — paid for that progress with their lives in ways that the history books have rarely acknowledged proportionally.
Across the Creek is Hagley doing what it does best: using its unparalleled archival collections to tell a more complete, more honest version of American history. The du Pont powder works supplied gunpowder for every major American military conflict from the War of 1812 through World War One. The human cost of that supply chain deserves to be part of the story.
The Program
The evening takes place in the Hagley Library Copeland Room at 298 Buck Road — GPS to that address, not the main museum entrance. Templeton will discuss his research process, share stories from the archive, and take questions from the audience. Tickets are required…