Duke University - Chanticleer Yearbook (Durham, NC)

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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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r U K E INTRODUCTION In the heady talk of Sun Belt pros- perity in the late twentieth century, it is all too easy to forget that things were vastly different in North Carolina and the South in the early decades of the century. Poverty — stark and perva- sive, affecting both whites and blacks — characterized most of the South after the Civil War and up until the time when World War II finally began to bring changes. The massive economic fact of that poverty together with the region’s persistent sectional defensive- ness guaranteed that the South would lag behind in many aspects of the na- tion’s development. In higher education the most revolu- tionary change came in other parts of the nation when the idea of the modern research university, an idea imported from Germany, inspired the establish- ment of Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore. It opened its doors in 1876, and within the next three decades in the Northeast, Midwest and Far West either older colleges reorganized and transformed themselves into research universities or new institutions (such as Chicago and Stanford) were launched. While Johns Hopkins is in the border state of Maryland, in the rest of the entire South as late as the 1920s there was not a single major research univer- sity. True, there were stirrings in state- supported universities in Chapel Hill, Charlottesville and Austin, stirrings that augured well for the future of those institutions. But they too were then only in the early or take-off stages. In the mid-1920s William Preston Few, the scholarly professor of English who had become president of Trinity College in 1910, sold the idea of organiz- ing a new university around Trinity College to James B. Duke. Few’s dream was an audacious one, for he meant for North Carolina and the South to have a voluntarily supported, major research university, one that would generously but rigorously serve students from its own region as well as those from other regions who might wish to come to it. From Methodist-related Trinity Col- lege, Duke University inherited several salient characteristics. Trinity early set out to transcend the old-style, often bit- ter sectionalism that engulfed so much of the South after the Civil War. That it succeeded in its courageous course is best illustrated in the Bassett Affair of 1903, where the college stood up for academic freedom, as well as for a pro- fessor who had uttered “racial heresies” according to prevailing orthodoxies. With financial support coming large- ly from James B. Duke’s father and older brother, Washington and Benja- min N. Duke, Trinity early began to insist that it wished to measure itself by national rather than regional stan- dards; to stand out as academically strong when compared to other institu- tions in the most poverty-stricken sec- tion of the nation was not good enough — either for Trinity or, ultimately, for North Carolina and the South. Trinity also wanted its sought-for excellence to be of the utmost possible service to the people of its region as well as to those who were welcomed from other parts of the country. All of this fitted well with the t hinking of the Dukes, for they were unusual Tar Heels in their day: while they were staunch Methodists, they were also nationally minded because of their far-flung business interests, and they were rich Republicans in a sea of mostly poor Southern Democrats. Managing with great sensitivity and skill to oversee the transformation of the old liberal arts college, whose roots went back to 1838, into a modern re- search university, Few also managed to keep the loyalty and support of the col- lege’s largely Methodist alumni and friends. And he shared with James B. Duke the happy task of planning for the construction of the extensive new facili- ties that the university would require. As the plans began to take shape for a new university to be organized around an old college, the president, William Preston Few, prophesied in September,

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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