Dupont Highway
New Castle, DE 19720Manufacturer: O'Mahony (1948)
Earl's was featured in a series of Farm Security Administration photographs by John Vachon in 1940. Those photos appear below.
This diner is now located in Sommerville, Massachusetts and is known as Kelly's Diner.
Although it is hard to confirm with 100% certainty, Earl's was probably the diner Jack Kerouac and photographer Robert Frank visited in 1960:
'We started off in N.Y. at noon on a pretty Spring day and didn't take any pictures till we had negotiated the dull but useful stretch of the New Jersey Turnpike and come on down to Highway 40 in Delaware where we stopped for a snack in a roadside diner. I didn't see anything in particular to photograph, or 'write about,' but suddenly Robert was taking his first snap. From the counter where we sat, he had turned and take a picture of a big car-trailer with piled cars, two tiers, pulling into the gravel driveyard, but through the window and right over the scene of leftovers and dishes where a family had just vacated a booth and got in their car and driven off, and the waitress not had time yet to clear the dishes...'
--- Jack Kerouac, 'On the Road to Florida,' Evergreen Review, January 1960.
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