Jump Starts in DuPont Washington

DuPont is a city in Pierce County, Washington, United States. The population was 10,151 at the 2020 census. Originally a company town, the city is named after the DuPont chemical company which operated an explosives manufacturing plant in the area from 1909 to 1975.

For 10,000 years the Nisqually Tribe lived in relative peace and prosperity in its aboriginal homeland of about two million acres (810,000 ha) near the present-day towns of Olympia, Tenino, and DuPont, and extending to Mount Rainier. Tribal life changed radically with the advent of Euro-American settlement about 150 years ago. Forced to compromise its interests and rights over the years, the Tribe always sought to maintain its integrity and dignity. Subsisting on shellfish from the beaches and salmon from Sequalitchew Creek. Captain George Vancouver mapped the area in 1792, and in 1833, the Hudson’s Bay Company established a fur trading post at Fort Nisqually as a halfway point between Ft. Vancouver and Ft. Langley. The fort was relocated upstream in 1843. It was relocated to expand on the fort to house more workers and to have better access to fresh water. Charles Wilkes of the United States Exploring Expedition held the first American Independence Day celebration west of the Mississippi River in the present-day DuPont area on July 5, 1841.

The first school in the area was the Nisqually Methodist Mission school, which operated from 1840 through 1842. Chloe A. Clark was appointed teacher at the school. The first public school was established in 1852. By 1869, the Hudson Bay Company had to sell the land to the U.S. government for $650,000.
The Oregon Treaty of 1846 gave the land of the Oregon Territory to the U.S. but still allowed the HBC to continue operating in the area. American farmers in the area resented this decision and pushed out the company by establishing their own market place and squatting on company land. By 1865, there were about 150 illegal squatters on company property who would harass the livestock of the Hudson’s Bay Company. A few of the farmers urged Congress to remove the fort as well as the Puget Sound Agricultural Company from the Pacific Northwest. These conditions made it hard to continue operations in the region so the fort was closed.

The land was up for grabs once Hudson’s Bay Company left and many farmers bought the land. In 1906, the DuPont chemical company purchased a 5-square-mile (13 km) area from the farmers for construction of an explosives plant, as the company was in the midst of expanding into the west. The plant was built on the initial 1833 Ft. Nisqually site and was completed in 1909. During its nearly 70-year history, the plant produced dynamite for the U.S. military as well as for the construction of various civilian projects including the Grand Coulee Dam, the Alcan Highway, and the Panama Canal.

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