Wilmington Fertilizer Co. must have been among the most prominent of the city’s many such manufacturers, but I’ve had little luck nailing down details of its existence. This sign claims 1889 as the company’s birth, and the design of this clock suggests it was still around as late as the 1970s.
Perhaps the area’s best-known fertilizer maker was Navassa Guano Co., whose history is deeply reported here by the inimitable David Cecelski.
I strain to imagine what it was like for laborers who spent their days lifting and unloading 200-pound bags of guano.