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Overview

DuPont's Louviers plant, located between Denver and Colorado Springs, was one of the oldest explosives operations in the country when it closed in the early 1980s. At an altitude of 5,680 feet, Louviers was also the highest dynamite plant in the United States. In 1906 DuPont purchased 1,800 acres for the new plant at Gann's Station, a small outpost on the Denver & Rio Grande Railroad. Two years later the Louviers plant opened to serve the western mining, oil exploration and construction markets. Named after a village near the ancestral home of the du Pont family in France, the new facility included houses, stores, a school and a library for workers and their families. DuPont brought in a nucleus of experienced explosives workers from its Ashburn plant in Missouri to help insure a safe start-up and appointed Arthur D. Chambers, a Ph.D. chemist and Johns Hopkins University graduate, as its first superintendent. Chambers oversaw Louviers operations for seven years before returning to Wilmington to help establish DuPont's new dyestuffs business.

DuPont soon found another market niche for Louviers in manufacturing large quantities of permissibles -- explosives with salts added to reduce the intensity of flames in explosions, and therefore safer for use in underground mines. Louviers supplied permissibles to the coal mines of Colorado, Arizona and Utah and produced technologically sophisticated explosives for other customers for 70 years. In 1977 DuPont ceased domestic production of dynamite and switched to safer, "water gel" explosives like Tovex®. In 1988 DuPont and DuPont Canada sold their explosives businesses to ETI Inc., a Canadian firm. Many former Louviers employees and their descendents remain in the DuPont-built homes that they purchased from the company in the 1960s. Louviers Village was placed on the National Register of Historic Places in 1999.

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