Various generations of the du Pont family built opulent homes in the rural Brandywine Valley northwest of Wilmington. To learn how their fortune was made, stop first at the Hagley Museum , off Hwy-141 just north of Wilmington (mid-March to Dec daily 9.30am-4.30pm; Jan to mid-March Sat & Sun 9.30am-4.30pm; $9.75). Pierre du Pont, the patriarch, was minister of finance to Louis XVI, but the museum begins later with the founding in 1802 of a small water-powered gunpowder mill along the banks of the Brandywine River. Mirroring the development of nineteenth-century American industry, the complex grew over the next hundred years to include ever-larger steam-powered and eventually electrically-powered factories - almost all of which are still in working order.

The enormous pink Nemours Mansion , just a mile up the road, gives an idea of the wealth and power the family garnered (May-Nov Tues-Sat 9am-3pm, Sun 11am-3pm; tours every two hours; $10). It was built by Alfred du Pont in 1910, modeled upon the family's ancestral home in France and surrounded by a three-hundred-acre, Versailles-style formal garden. Two miles northwest, off Hwy-52, the one-time du Pont family estate of Winterthur (Mon-Sat 9am-5pm, Sun noon-5pm; $10, gardens only $5) has evolved into the country's finest museum of early American decorative arts. Since 1927, when Henry du Pont took over the twelve-room cottage to house himself and his antique furniture, Winterthur has grown into a vast private museum, each of its two hundred rooms showcasing a particular decorative style. Ranging from the simplicity of a Shaker cottage to a beautiful three-story elliptical staircase taken from a North Carolina plantation home, the various pieces of furniture, textiles, silverwork and paintings - all made in America between 1640 and 1860 - form a rich catalog of the diversity of American applied arts.

Du Pont mansions

• Du Pont mansions

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