The banks of the Brandywine Creek have a rich industrial history and the Hagley Museum and Library has started a new project to digitally preserve that heritage.
Thanks to a $4,500 grant from the Delaware Humanities Forum, the Hagley Library is developing a comprehensive, online database called Industrial Brandywine History.
Hagley was one of six organizations to receive a piece of $35,000 in grant money the forum awarded as part of the Delaware Industrial History Initiative, a program aimed at studying the life cycles of industry.
Industrial Brandywine History will catalogue all known businesses along the creek between the 18th and 20th centuries, said Terry Snyder, deputy director, library administration. Data on those businesses will also be used to develop maps and graphs to help users understand the information, she said.
Since the first mill set up shop along the Brandywine in the mid-1700s, the story of local industrialization tells a larger story about the evolution of technology and business throughout the United States, Snyder said. Entrepreneurs used the abundant water power from the creek, primary location near major cities and navigable waters to build some of the most innovative and successful businesses in the nation, she said.
The library has hired Alessandra Wood, a Ph.D. student from the University of Delaware, to sift through tomes of secondary source material on the creek’s industrial history, identify and scan relevant data, Snyder said. Tracking down information is not as easy as one might think – many writings went unpublished, are out of print or sit, forgotten, in the archives of other historical institutions, she said.
For example, the writings of historian Arthur Hancock, who studied the industrial Brandywine in the 1950s, were largely forgotten until the information was uncovered and shared through Hagley’s digital archives.
The library began digitizing records in earnest in 2008 and has added more than 130,000 pages to the digital archives, Snyder said. The archives have seen nearly 1.5 million page visits from all over the world.
“As we move at today’s increasing pace, we often lose site of the lessons of the past,” she said. “This particular project, ‘Industrial Brandywine History,’ will allow the people of New Castle County to become re-acquainted with their heritage and to delve more deeply into that past.”
