You are here

St. Amour Site

-A A +A
1890–1892, Albert W. Dilks. 1918 garden, Marian Cruger Coffin. North corner of Kennett Pike (DE 52) and Rising Sun Ln.

Here stood a famous chateau, now demolished. Mary Belin du Pont, widow of Lammot (who died in a chemical plant explosion in 1884), had a Queen Anne–style stone mansion with turrets and tower built by a Philadelphia architect. Her son, Pierre S. du Pont, twenty-two years old when the house was finished, helped supervise construction and lived here as he began his career with the family company after graduating from Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Brother Irénée (see Granogue, CH9) helped design the original garden. Another brother, Lammot, purchased the home following his mother's death in 1913 and expanded it to forty rooms. All three men eventually headed the DuPont Company. The du Pont family celebrated its American centennial at St. Amour in 1900. The mansion was acquired by adjacent Tower Hill School (WL93) and demolished in 1972 as too expensive to heat or keep up. All that remains are some garages—presumably those erected by Smyth Construction Company after World War I—and an abandoned, walled garden.

Writing Credits

Author: 
W. Barksdale Maynard
×

Data

What's Nearby

Citation

W. Barksdale Maynard, "St. Amour Site", [Wilmington, Delaware], SAH Archipedia, eds. Gabrielle Esperdy and Karen Kingsley, Charlottesville: UVaP, 2012—, http://sah-archipedia.org/buildings/DE-01-CH23.

Print Source

Cover: Buildings of Delaware

Buildings of Delaware, W. Barksdale Maynard. Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 2008, 73-73.

If SAH Archipedia has been useful to you, please consider supporting it.

SAH Archipedia tells the story of the United States through its buildings, landscapes, and cities. This freely available resource empowers the public with authoritative knowledge that deepens their understanding and appreciation of the built environment. But the Society of Architectural Historians, which created SAH Archipedia with University of Virginia Press, needs your support to maintain the high-caliber research, writing, photography, cartography, editing, design, and programming that make SAH Archipedia a trusted online resource available to all who value the history of place, heritage tourism, and learning.

,