Coleman du Pont Biography

Coleman du Pont

After graduating from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, he began his career in his father's coal mines in Kentucky, the Central Coal & Iron Company. He managed a steel company briefly, then became involved in constructing and managing street railways. He and his cousins, Alfred and Pierre du Pont, bought out the family's explosives company in Delaware. He became its president and oversaw the acquisition of more than one hundred competing firms, and their subsequent reorganization into a holding company, E. I du Pont de Nemours Company of New Jersey. The company so dominated the gunpowder manufacturing that it was successfully sued in 1907 for antitrust violations. He sold off his stake of the business in 1914, turning his attention to real estate, insurance, and hotels. At one time, he owned the Waldorf-Astoria and McAlpin hotels in New York, as well as the Willard in Washington, D.C., and was responsible for building New York's largest office building of its day, the Equitable Life Building.