I’ve just dug deeper into the wonderful resources of the Hagley Museum and Library. I looked into their digital exhibits and just selected the Brandywine Valley that I thought would interest people.
They also have digital exhibits on Beer and Brewing history, a collection on Automobile Advertising, The History of Product Packaging, and the Dupont Gunpowder Works, among many others.

Brandywine Valley Oral History Project

From 1954 to 1990, Hagley Library staff and volunteers interviewed over 150 people who lived and worked in the Brandywine Valley in northern Delaware. The living memory of those interviewed went as far back as the last quarter of the nineteenth century.

Many remembered the working communities that lived and thrived alongside the Valley’s stores, factories, workshops, and churches. Most of the interview subjects either worked or had a relative employed in the DuPont Company Powder Yards, a black powder manufacturing facility, that started on the Brandywine in 1802 and closed in 1921.

The recorded interviews and transcripts — now available online in the Hagley Digital Archives — capture in fine detail the lives of people in the Brandywine communities from the last half of the nineteenth century into the first half of the twentieth.

The interviews document work, traditions, social life, and household routines. They underscore the inherent danger of black powder production with harrowing descriptions of explosions and accidents.

The collection also traces the DuPont Company’s story beyond Delaware as they spread geographically and diversified its business into synthetic fiber and chemical production.

This exhibit provides a gateway to the larger collection of interviews through a thematic selection of clips selected by Hagley staff, these clips highlight a few of the prominent subjects in the oral history interviews.

https://www.hagley.org/research/digital-exhibits/brandywine-valley-oral-history-project

Here is just one entry presented in Working on the Brandywine section of the exhibit. It includes an audio recording and an option to view a transcript of the recording. Scroll down through the other interesting entries to find the one on Walter Aurand.

A Wilmington native born in 1891, Walter Aurand Powder testing helped to pay for his chemistry degree at the University of Delaware by working as a college sports reporter and performing chemical analysis for his fellow students. From 1915 to 1917, Aurand ran a laboratory at the DuPont Experimental Station, where his primary project was “perfecting” tracer bullets for use in airplanes during World War I.
In this clip, he describes the difficulties of the project and how a solution unexpectedly came to him during the middle of the night.

https://www.hagley.org/research/digital-exhibits/working-brandywine