Henry Francis du Pont

Henry was born on May 27, 1880, at Winterthur. He was the only son of Henry Algernon du Pont and Mary Pauline Foster to live to maturity; by the time he was born, his parents had already buried five children. Their only other surviving child, Louise E. du Pont Crowninshield, was a historic preservationist and founding trustee of the National Trust for Historic Preservation.

A shy and lonely boy who contrasted with his authoritarian father, young du Pont attended boarding school at Groton School in Massachusetts. After graduating from Groton at the bottom of his class of sixteen, du Pont went on to study horticulture at the Bussey Institution at Harvard University, receiving his bachelor's degree in 1903. His best grade at Harvard was a B minus, for a garden study class. His mother, to whom he was close, died shortly before he graduated, which shook him profoundly and deepened his lifelong reticence. His father recalled him home to oversee the estate, a task at which he would excel.

In 1916, after a seven-year courtship, he married socialite Ruth Wales (1889–1967), a Hyde Park neighbor of du Pont's Groton classmate Franklin Roosevelt, who attended their wedding. Ruth had little interest in farming and disliked Winterthur, dismissing the rural estate as "Frog Hollow" and preferring to spend most of the year at their Park Avenue apartment in New York City or their summer residence at Southampton on Long Island. Southampton's Ruth Wales du Pont Sanctuary was named after her.

Henry and Ruth had two children, Pauline Louise du Pont (1918–2007) and Ruth Ellen du Pont Lord (1922–2014). Their younger daughter, Ruth, wrote a memoir about her father and his estate, Henry F. du Pont and Winterthur: A Daughter's Portrait (Yale University Press, 1999), which portrayed du Pont as a kindly but aloof parent.

The du Ponts were lifelong Republicans and openly expressed distaste for their friend Roosevelt's New Deal programs.

Du Pont died on April 11, 1969. He was buried in Du Pont de Nemours Cemetery.