The du Pont family has had a hold on Delaware since Pierre Samuel du Pont de Nemours, a nobleman in the court of King Louis XVI, escaped the guillotine after the French Revolution and came to the United States in 1800 with his son, Éleuthère Irénée du Pont.
John E. du Pont was the great-great-grandson of Éleuthère Irénée, a chemist who in 1802 built the powder mills on the banks of the Brandywine that evolved into the modern-day DuPont Co. It put Wilmington and the First State on the map.
