The Crowninshield Garden at the Hagley Museum and Library in Wilmington, Delaware, carries a century of layered histories within its terraced walls. Built in the 1920s on the ruins of the Eleutherian Mills, the gunpowder manufacturing site established by Éleuthère Irénée du Pont in the early nineteenth century, the garden's neoclassical framework of reflecting pools, stone balustrades, and formal plantings was itself eventually abandoned, leaving behind a palimpsest of American industrial ambition and domestic cultivation. When the Hagley Museum engaged Nelson Byrd Woltz to reconsider the garden's future, the question was not simply how to restore it, but how to read it.
NBW took a rehabilitative approach, distinguishing carefully between what warranted restoration, what called for reconstruction, and what was best left as ruin. Working closely with structural engineers Silman, the team assessed each historic structure for integrity and intervention potential, mapping a full range of preservation opportunities across the site. The result, a Research Synthesis and Conceptual Design, established a clear, flexible framework that supports creative horticultural display and public visitation without imposing a singular narrative on a site that holds many.
The design honors the Crowninshield Garden's neoclassical bones while opening its inherited form to a 21st-century reading of American industrial history. Terraced levels once defined by the manufacture of explosives now frame spaces for contemplation and seasonal planting; stone columns and foundations that once anchored factory infrastructure become foils for ecological planting and quiet inquiry. The framework NBW developed does not resolve the garden's many histories into one story — it holds them in productive tension, giving visitors the layered experience this place and its difficult, beautiful past demands.
