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The year was 1902, the 100th anniversary of the founding of the E.I. duPont de Nemous and Company. For a century, except for three years of stewardship by a family friend after the death of the founder, the DuPont Company had been family run. Now, as Eugene duPont was preparing to retire there was no one remaining in the immediate family with the interest or capability to run the nationÕs largest gunpowder manufacturer. Family members began preparations for the inevitable selling off of the family business.
Just before the sale, three cousins, great-grandsons of the company's founder, stepped forward with a plan to buy and operate the DuPont Company, putting up stock and notes as compensation. The key to acceptance of the deal was the inclusion of the most experienced of the triad of cousins, Thomas Coleman duPont, who had taken over his fatherÕs coal mining interests in Kentucky. Together, the three cousins transformed the family gunpowder firm into a chemical conglomerate of almost unimaginable wealth.
Coleman duPont, the President of the new organization, was a builder at heart. After building the DuPont Company he turned to his many other interests. He was part of the consortium that built the world's tallest building in the early 1910s, but his builder's eye was looking down, not up. Coleman duPont was planning to build a highway the entire length of the state of Delaware from the Pennsylvania border in the north to the Maryland line at the bottom of the state.
An early proponent of the automobile, the visionary duPont knew the economic benefits that would accrue to the stateÕs towns and communities with a modern highway. Always the big thinker, Coleman duPont was not visualizing some utilitarian road, however. He proposed a grand boulevard with a 200-foot right of way that had room for trolley tracks and tree-lined pedestrian walkways. His highway would be lined with lamp posts and peppered with air-landing strips. Interspersed along the way would be information kiosks that would make the latest scientific advances available to Delaware farmers.
Like many visionaries with a plan, Coleman duPont took his ideas for a state-long highway to the Delaware General Assembly. But there was a difference. Coleman duPont was proposing to build this modern highway, Delaware's first paved road, with his own money.
He formed the Coleman duPont Road company and began building his road in the southern section of Delaware in 1911. His plans were too grand for even his deep pockets so he had to sacrifice some of his goals as they laid the concrete road through swamps and forests and across farmland. Places that had scarcely seen an automobile were getting a modern concrete road.
In 1917, the Delaware Highway Department was established to complete the work which duPont agreed to personally finance at a cost not to exceed $44,000 per mile. The DuPont Highway was completed in 1924 and stretched 96.7 miles. The Dover to Wilmington segment of the road was the longest divided highway in the world when it was completed. Thomas Coleman duPont had spent nearly $4 million of his own money to complete the road.
As he envisioned, the DuPont Highway opened up the markets of southern Delaware and enabled the creation of the Delmarva chicken industry, among many others, to develop. Generations of northern Delawareans have packed up bathing suits and steered onto Route 13, as the DuPont Highway is numerically known, to head for the beach. 'Others may build their monuments to the sky,' Coleman duPont once said, 'but I am going to build a monument a hundred miles high and lay it down on the ground.'
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