- [Narrator] Today the name Duke is synonymous
with a great university, hospital, and power company.
But it all started with tobacco hung in a corn crib.
A few yards behind a visitor's center
at the Duke Homestead historic site,
you step back into the world of the 1800s.
In 1864, Washington Duke joined the Confederate Army.
He was captured by Union soldiers and placed
in an internment camp in Richmond.
After the Civil War, he was transported to New Bern
and walked the 135 miles back home.
There was not much left but a few stalks
of tobacco left hanging in the barn.
- Really this is where it all started.
This building is where, when Washington Duke
returned from the Civil War, he started his business,
W. Duke and Sons and his youngest sons,
Benjamin and really James Duke
turned that into the American Tobacco Company
which grew into the largest tobacco
manufacturing company in the world.
So this house was built in 1852, the same year
Washington met and married his second wife, Artelia.
They moved here with his two sons.
They had three more children here in this house.
It was just a four-room farmhouse to start with,
two rooms downstairs and two bedrooms upstairs for the kids.
- [Narrator] Tobacco was a profitable,
but labor-intensive crop.
The Dukes turned it into a family enterprise.
Washington Duke was at the right place and the right time,
as tobacco was a thriving cash crop
and Durham was becoming a major center
for tobacco production.
- Washington Duke's sons were the ones taking
cured tobacco leaf and processing it into pipe tobacco.
His daughter, Mary, was hand-sewing cotton pouches
and pasting labels onto the packaging for their product
while Washington rode around selling it.
Also living here in the home with the family,
we believe was Caroline, who was the only enslaved person
that the Duke family owned.
Washington Duke purchased her in 1855.
We think she slept upstairs with the children.
She was separated from her mother and sister at that time.
- [Narrator] As the Duke family prospered,
the story is picked up by Duke archivist,
Valerie Gillespie, who takes us
to the Duke family's final resting place in Duke Chapel.
- So in 1874, the Dukes were producing
125,000 pounds of tobacco a year.
It had outgrown the homestead.
So Washington Duke moved to Durham and built a factory here
as well as a Queen Anne-style house
that's no longer in Durham,
but the pictures are really spectacular.
Washington Duke as a Methodist and as a man
was a real philanthropist and I think he passed
that down to this children and his grandchildren.
He supported not only schools like Trinity College,
later to be Duke University, but also Kittrell College,
a historically African-American institution.
He helped support Watts Hospital,
the white hospital in Durham, but he also gave money
to build the Lincoln Hospital, which was a hospital
for African-Americans in Durham.
He really crossed racial barriers in doing some of that.
Part of the reason why Trinity College moved
out of Randolph Country into Durham
was the offer of monies from Washington Duke,
as well as offer of land from Julian Carr.
Washington Duke's gift of $100,000
to Trinity College came with the requirement
that women be admitted as well as men.
With that, he made a bold step into providing
more educational opportunities for women.
When you go to Duke Homestead, you see how modest
the home is and how humble the beginnings were
and seeing that just a few miles away
from Duke University, you realize what an amazing man
Washington Duke was and the philanthropic legacy
that he left behind.
- [Deborah] Duke Homestead State Historic Site
is at 2828 Duke Homestead Road in Durhma
and they're open Tuesday through Saturday
from 9:00 a.m. to 5:00 p.m.
For more information, give the site a call
at 919-627-6990 or go online to dukehomestead.org.