Duke University - Chanticleer Yearbook (Durham, NC)

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tion. He secured the first option in No- vember, 1924, and by the spring of 1925 had succeeded in buying more land than was immediately needed. Pur- chases to round out the holdings con- tinued for many years, in fact, and Duke University wound up eventually owning around 8,000 acres, mostly in a forest preserve. It would never be handicapped by the land scaricty that plagues many educational institutions. Until James B. Duke had seen the new land, however, no one knew whether it would actually be used for the univer- stiy or, if so, just how. In three busy spring days in late March, 1925, as the dogwood and red- bud trees bloomed in what can be a magical time in the Carolina Piedmont, a great deal of the planning was accom- plished for what became the two cam- puses of Duke University. When James B. Duke finally inspected the new land, he, in consultation with Few, Trum- bauer, and one or two others, quickly decided that the Tudor Gothic build- ings, with a soaring chapel at their cen- ter, would be erected on the new land on a crest overlooking a deep ravine, which Duke envisioned as a lake. A life- long lover of fountains and water-falls, Duke pictured a great fountain in the central quadrangle with the water cas- cading over falls that emptied into the lake. The long-desired coordinate col- lege for women, rather than being crowded into a corner of the old Trinity campus, would occupy that entire cam- pus. While some of the existing build- ings there would be retained, several would have to go in order to make room for eleven new buildings to be con- structed of red brick and white marble in the neo-classic style so beloved by Thomas Jefferson. Trumbauer’s construction superin- tendent kept a simple notebook which is one of the few documentary sources for the decisions made in that spring of 1925. “Met Mr. Duke today,” the super- intendent recorded, “and went over the ground for the new University.” When Trumbauer arrived, the superintendent noted that he explained to the architect “the new location of the layout on top of the hill moving the chapel forward so it will come on the high ground. And the library was “to be moved over to a high spot to the right of where shown on plans, this being Mr. Duke’s idea of how the layout should be.” Trumbauer and his associates returned to Philadel- phia with instructions to prepare work- ing drawings, first for the new buildings on the Trinity campus, soon to be known as the East Campus, and then later for the Tudor Gothic structures to be erected on the new land, which would become the West Campus. The selection of the stone to be used in the Tudor Gothic bildings was an- other matter of keen interest to James B. Duke. Initially assuming that the stone would have to come from one of the well-known quarries in the North, he arranged for freightcar-loads of var- ious samples of stone to be shipped to Durham so that test walls could be built on the Trinity campus. Frank Brown, in the meantime, learned of an aban- doned quarry near Hillsborough, only a few miles from Durham. After a sample wall of the local stone had been built, Brown informed Trumbauer that it was “much more attractive than the Prince- ton wall” and “much warmer and softer in coloring. Morever, it would cost not more than $3.50 per ton delivered as compared to an estimated $21.00 per ton for the Princeton stone. Duke au- thorized the purchase of the quarry and additional testing of the stone. He was

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1924 it would be “The most harmoni- ous, imposing and altogether beautiful educational plant in America.” Such physical beauty as Few envisioned would be owing in part to the universi- ty’s setting in the North Carolina Pied- mont, with its gently rolling terrain and forests filled with pines, dogwoods, red- buds and numerous other varieties of trees. But human choices and aesthetic tastes played an even larger role than the setting in producing the beauty, for the Carolina Piedmont, like other sce- nic areas of the nation, has perhaps been more often defaced than enhanced by human design. The prospect of extensive construc- tion at Trinity College excited James B. Duke, for that was something he en- joyed and had learned a great deal about in his varied careers in tobacco, textile manufacturing and the electric- power industry. To design the new buildings he selected the then well- known architectural firm of Horace Trumbauer of Philadelphia, which had built for Duke both an elegant white marble mansion on New York’s Fifth Avenue in 1910 and elaborate green- houses on his estate in New Jersey. In the spring of 1924, Few and Frank Brown, a professor of English and key aide to Few in matters relating to the grounds and buildings, visited Trum- bauer in Philadelphia before embarking on a study-tour of a large number of colleges and universities. At Bryn Mawr College, for example, they care- fully examined and collected pictures of the stone buildings constructed in what was known as the Collegiate Gothic or Tudor Gothic style. Handsome dormitories in that style had been erected at Princeton Universi- ty not long before World War I. Duke’s country estate was not far from Prince- ton, and he had seen and admired the new, stone structures. He could not have articulated the matter as did Prin- ceton’s president, but James B. Duke perhaps unconsciously shared the thinking of Woodrow Wilson: “By the very simple device of constructing our new buildings in the Tudor Gothic style we seem to have added to Princeton the age of Oxford and of Cambridge; we have added a thousand years to the his- tory of Princeton by merely putting those lines in our architecture which point every man’s imagination to his- toric traditions of learning in the Eng- lish-speaking race.” Few and Brown certainly shared Wil- son’s penchant for the Tudor Gothic style, and they carefully studied more of it at Yale, Cornell, Chicago and else- where. They were also charmed, howev- er, at Thomas Jefferson’s University of Virginia, and at other colleges in that state, by the pleasing combination of red brick and white columns in build- ings of neo-classical or Georgia design. Neverless, by September, 1924, James B. Duke, Trumbauer, Few, and Brown had decided that the new buildings at Trinity would be constructed of stone in the Tudor Gothic style — distinctly my first choice,” Few happily reported to Ben Duke. Despite the fact that Trinity’s cam- pus was already a spacious one, addi- tional land would be required for the planned expansion. Land to the north of the campus, especially in the area of what was then Watts Hospital, would be needed for the possible medical school. Although Few put agents quiet- ly to work acquiring options for the nec- essary land as early as 1923, they en- countered various obstacles as well as sharply rising prices as rumors spread about Trinity’s expansion. With James B. Duke growing increasingly annoyed by the delay and difficulty in acquiring the land, Few had an inspiration as he hiked with his young sons through a beautiful wooded, hilly area a mile or so to the west of the Trinity campus. “It was for me a thrilling moment when I stood on a hill,” Few later wrote, “.. . and realized that here at last is the land we have been looking for.” With James B. Duke’s approval, Rob- ert L. Flowers, the vice president of Trinity College, went to work acquiring the new land with the utmost discre- Introduction 5

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pleased by the wide range of colors in the Hillsborough stone — various shades of brown, yellow, gray, blue, green and black — and gained assur- ance of its durability from both the state geologist’s office and the Bureau of Standards in Washington. When Duke and the trustees of the Endow- ment met in Durham in late March, 1925, he proudly led them to the sample walls where balloting revealed a decid- ed preference for the local stone. A ven- erable style of English architecture in- spired the original buildings of Duke’s West Campus, but the warmly colored stone came from a nearby Piedmont hillside. As much concerned about the lands- caping of the campuses as about the architecture, Duke selected one of the leading firms in the nation, Olmsted Brothers of Boston, to redesign the Trinity campus and to lay out the grounds for the new one. Founded by Frederick Law Olmsted, the creator of New York’s Central Park and of many other famous parks, the Olmsted firm emphasized, among other things, the use of attractive native trees and shrubs where possible; thence came the magni- ficent Southern magnolias, the great live oaks, the cedars, and other native trees that grace the two campuses. As the rebuilding of the old Trinity campus began in the summer of 1925, James B. Duke, up to then a vigorous and extremely active sixty-eight year old man, fell ill. His doctors, initially puzzled, finally diagnosed pernicious anemia, and Duke died in his Fifth Ave- nue mansion on October 10, 1925. Aside from the annual support for Duke Uni- versity that would come in perpetuity from The Duke Endowment — ap- proximately one-third of its annual in- come was designated for the university — James B. Duke provided altogether about $19 million for the physical plant of Duke University on its two cam- puses. Saddened by his younger brother’s death, an increasingly bed ridden Ben Duke lived until January 8, 1929. His own interest in first Trinity College and then Duke University never waned. While his gifts to the institution includ- ed such significant contributions as the Angier B. Duke Memorial scholarship fund in honor of his deceased son, Ben Duke’s role was overshadowed by the munificence of James B. Duke. None- theless, Few and others in the universi- ty publicly acknowleged and empha- sized the institution’s long-standing and crucial debt to Ben Duke. Despite James B. Duke’s great gener- osity to Duke University, the grim but unpublicized truth was that there was simply not enough money to do ever- ything in the manner that Duke had originally envisioned. Few had sold him on a most ambitious undertaking. If the philanthropist had lived, matters would no doubt have been quite differ- ent, but as it was, Few and his principle associates were forced to cut down on various plans in order to stay within available income. The lake that James B. Duke had wanted on West Campus and the two great fountains there, as well as the fountain in the circle be- tween the handsome Georgian library and matching union building on the East Campus, all had to be eliminated. Various other cost-cutting measures, all relatively minor, had to be taken in the Gothic dormitories. The loss of the lake may have been a blessing, for that ravine became the site first of an iris garden which Dr. Freder- ick M. Hanes persuaded Mrs. Ben Duke to underwrite. Then after she died in 1936, her daughter, Mrs. Mary Duke Biddle, completed and expanded the project that her mother had helped start. The magnificent Sarah P. Duke Gardens, significantly enlarged in the decades after their formal opening in 1938, became one of the most distinc- tive as well as most beautiful parts of the university. By 1930, as the chapel tower, which was the last of the original Tudor Goth- ic structures to be built, began to climb upward among the lofty pines, Presi- dent Few’s worries about money had somewhat abated. He confided to an as- sociate: “The routine at times may be dull and gray, but the vision of the fu- ture is always golden and infinitely in- spiring.” Few drew great satisfaction from his belief that “we have now hit the open sea and that a long journey is ahead of Duke University.” It was to be a journey in which, in one very real sense, the past lived on in the present. Robert F. Durden Professor of History Duke University Introduction 7