Duke University - Chanticleer Yearbook (Durham, NC)

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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