While you might be familiar with the chemical giant Du Pont, how much do you know about how
its founding family lived? Hi everyone, ken here, welcome to this house. Today we
are exploring Winterthur in Delaware, the family home of the Du Ponts. Make sure to
hit that subscribe button so you never miss an exciting episode of this house.
Henry Francis Du Pont was born into wealth. His father was a senator who had purchased
the estate named Winterthur from his family who had grown their wealth through gun powder
and later chemical production. Though the home had started as a 12 room house,
his father expanded it to include 30 rooms. Henry loved growing up here,
so it was no surprise that when he graduated from Harvard with a degree in horticulture, he returned
home. Henry yearned for a simple life, wanting to connect with nature. He identified himself
as a farmer and began raising dairy cattle and manicuring the gardens of the 2,500 acre estate.
Upon his father’s death in 1926, Henry inherited a massive fortune as the only surviving Du Pont son.
Over the next 6 years, as the great depression saw many wealthy families fall, Henry Du Pont saw
great fortune. He expanded his family house from 30 rooms to 175 rooms. All together, the colossal
mansion boasted 96, 582 square feet making it the 5th largest historic house in the United States.
He did so with the intention of creating a museum to be enjoyed by future generations.
With the market bottoming out, people were having massive estate sales to make ends meet. So henry
hit the road with his private chauffeur and took advantage of as many sales as he could.
He would visit homes and purchase entire rooms, including wall panels and other architectural
salvage as well as family heirlooms. But there was something in particular he really sought after,
he wanted to commemorate early Americana specifically dating from the 1640s to
the 1840s. All together, he purchased over 89,000 antiques on these trips.
Returning home to Winterthur he hired the nation’s leading interior designer,
Henry Davis Sleeper to help him configure period appropriate displays for each room.
Walking inside, you would be greeted by a floating
staircase spiraling through an oculus towards the top floor.
Meandering through the maze of rooms, you would come across many wonders including
the Chinese Room which Sleeper had designed to be very similar to his
own at Beauport which we covered in our previous video. The wallpaper
dated back to as early as 1775 and had been installed with the uptmost care.
Other rooms contained vintage wallpaper such
as Les Vues D’italie which dated back to the mid 19th century.
The living room was finished out with painted wood panels
offset by primary colors used in the upholstery and textiles.
The dining room’s wall panels were all painted white with the only intricate
carvings belonging to the fireplace’s upper mantle. Tucked into the walls were
display cases which were left open for guests to admire the porcelains within.
The family dining room was more humble with simple
pine boards run vertically on the walls with furniture reminiscent
of that which would have been found in the American frontier a century earlier.
Some rooms were more finished out with pilasters flanking built in cabinets
with wainscotting running below fabric wallpapers.
While some were entirely unadorned, featuring white walls and painted millwork with the only
interest to the spaces being provided by the antiques which decorated them.
But given the goal of creating a museum to commemorate American called for great variety
in the interior’s design. While exploring the mansion you could end up on a cobblestone
street with colonial and Italianate storefronts flaunting window displays.
You could then explore each store to see
Henry’s collections in a mockup of their original environments.
The mansion continued on and on offering a variety of interesting and unique rooms
to recreate the various aesthetics of the United States throughout its ages.
Even the bedrooms, which he and his family occupied,
were designed to be museum ready offering a glimpse into the early influences of the
country’s diverse cultures in the melting pot of American design.
Perhaps no collection was as complete as Henry’s library where it was said that 87,000 books were
stored with an additional 500,000 manuscripts rivaling university archives across the world.
In 1941, he opened the house to the public for the first time. He made
announcements and limited the first tours to only a handful of guests
who were required to send him a formal letter requesting a tour.
10 years later, in 1951, the family moved out of Winterthur and into a much smaller home. That same
year, they fully opened Winterthur to the public as a museum and added a garden experience the
following year to show off the landscaping which Henry had personally been working on for decades.
The museum brought Henry national attention, so much so that First Lady Jackie Kennedy
brough Henry to the White House to oversee its renovations in the 1960s. Shortly after,
in 1969, Henry passed away, but thankfully his dream for a house museum lived on. Winterthur
continues to be open to the public with over 900 acres of grounds to explore.
If you have ever visited, I would love to hear about your experience down below in
the comments section. And while you’re there, make sure to hit that subscribe button so you
never miss an exciting episode of this house. I would also like to say a huge thank you to our
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