History
The unique residential community of Wawaset Park occupies 50 acres near the western limits of the city of Wilmington, Delaware. Of its 207 homes, approximately half were constructed between 1918 and 1919 by the DuPont Company while the remainder were built in the late 1920s by individual owners and developers. Rapid industrialization sparked by World War I created a housing crisis in the city and spurred the DuPont Company to seek a solution for its growing executive ranks. By developing Wawaset Park, the company was able to provide homes to new and existing employees of its downtown headquarters, which had been built a decade prior.
Originally, the land comprising Wawaset Park was part of a farm whose owners included among others, the original Swedish settler Johan Stalcop and Thomas Shipley, an early Quaker flour-mill proprietor and son of the founder of Wilmington. After transitioning from a working farm, the tract served as a racetrack and fairgrounds for 60 years. In fact, Wawaset Park was the home of the Delaware State Fair from 1901 until 1917.
Having identified Wawaset Park as the site for its desired development, the DuPont Company hired Edward Palmer, Jr., a Baltimore architect to design a community that encompassed all levels of management. To that end, Palmer mixed multi-family structures, twin homes, and large, detached dwellings along a network of intimate streets. Rather than lay the neighborhood out on a traditional grid, he allowed the thoroughfares to follow the natural contours of the topography. Further, he made a point of setting the homes back from the streets to create a park-like space and sense of openness. Having lived for years in Roland Park, a Baltimore neighborhood designed by Frederick Olmstead, Palmer had a heightened appreciation for strategic land use and the preservation of communal open space within municipalities. Additionally, the houses he designed reflected a wide array of architectural styles – including Georgian, English Tudor, Dutch Colonial, French Revival, and Gothic – and integrated mixed materials, primarily brick, stucco, stone and combinations of the three. Following the precedent set by Roland Park, Palmer encouraged the DuPont Company to institute building and land-use restrictions to preserve the neighborhood aesthetics and high-quality of life for generations to come.