TRINITY COLLEGE AND DUKE UNIVERSITY
In spite of its commercial success, the surrounding towns still considered Durham a dirty, uncivilized, and sordid place. Kenneth Boyd observed: “Historic, aristocratic Hillsborough regarded it as distinctly second class. Classic Chapel Hill viewed it with disdain. Cultured but politic Raleigh lifted an eyebrow when it was mentioned.”77 Several of Durham's business tycoons set out to change that image by seeking to lure a college to the city.
In 1889 Baptist leaders in the state decided to create a Baptist Female Seminary, calling for proposals from cities interested in hosting such a school. Although Durham offered twice the financial support of other offers, it was turned down, the Baptist leaders “regarding the rough and rum-soaked mill town as no place they would send their daughters.”78 The more refined and respectable Raleigh was selected for the Baptist Female Seminary, which in 1909 became Meredith College. Currently Meredith College occupies a 225-acre campus in west Raleigh and has approximately twenty-one hundred students.
Two years later the leaders of Trinity College, a small, Methodist-affiliated, liberal arts school in rural Randolph County, announced their intention to move to a more urban setting. Durham's civic leaders were determined not to lose out again—they quickly made it known that they would trump any offer made by Raleigh. Washington Duke offered an $85,000 endowment and Julian Carr offered a sixty-two-acre site on the west side of downtown Durham.79 Thus, Trinity College moved to Durham.
In spite of the generous support from Duke and Carr, the early years of Durham's Trinity College were rough going. First, the main building being constructed on the new campus collapsed a day before its completion, delaying the move to Durham for another year. The need to build an entirely new campus also led to financial shortfalls that required additional gifts from Washington and Benjamin Duke, Julian Carr, and others. Washington Duke, in fact, offered the college an additional $100,000 if it would admit women. The trustees agreed and Trinity College became a leader in woman's education in the South. During this time the college established its progressive nature by supporting faculty members who took controversial positions on the issue of race. Professor John Spencer Bassett, for example, wrote in an article published in the South Atlantic Quarterly, which he founded: “Booker T. Washington was the second greatest man born in the South in the last 100 years.”80 (He granted that Robert E. Lee was the greatest.) Local newspapers called for his ouster but the board of trustees supported Bassett's right to free speech. In addition, when Booker T. Washington came to Durham to speak at the Colored County Fair in 1896, the college invited him to speak on campus. The college weathered these early storms and by the early 1900s it was a respected college on firm financial footing. Yet the ambitions of the college leadership were much bigger.
William P. Few, who assumed the college presidency in 1910, realized that there were no research-oriented universities in the South and set out to create one. He also realized that James B. Duke, who had added to his fortune in the electrical power business, was aging and potentially interested in establishing a legacy: “Few was able to develop a concept that inspired Duke to act—majestic, comprehensive and irresistible. The concept was of a university, named for the Duke family, at the heart of which would be a strong college of liberal arts surrounded by a constellation of professional schools, including a medical school and teaching hospital.”81
Duke acted in 1924, establishing the Duke Endowment and capitalizing it with $40 million. Thirty-two percent of the endowment's yearly income was to go to support Duke University while the remaining income would go to a variety of educational, medical, and religious organizations in North and South Carolina. The following year Trinity College was renamed Duke University.
The initial plan for the expansion of Duke University included the construction of eleven new buildings on the original campus, which was to become the women's college, and sixteen new buildings on what was initially conceived as an expansion of the original campus. Speculators, anticipating such an expansion, bought up land around the campus hoping to make a killing. Duke foiled their plans, however, by commissioning a local real estate agent to quietly buy a thousand-acre farm 1.2 miles from the original campus and, while he was at it, Duke had that agent purchase another seven thousand acres of land in Durham and Orange Counties. Bought for investment purposes, this additional land is now part of Duke Forest, and although it is used primarily by Duke University's School of Forestry, it doubles as passive recreation space for area residents.
James B. Duke took a personal interest in the design and construction of the new campus. His desire was to create a university to rival the best in the country and he wanted it to look that way. To achieve that end, he selected the Philadelphia-based Horace Trumbauer's architecture firm to design the buildings, and the Olmsted brothers of Brookline, Massachusetts, to develop the landscape plans for both the new campus and the original one. Until he died in October 1925, Duke “spent not only much money but much personal time on the original plans, worrying about everything from architectural detail and landscaping, to whether there should be ‘less of the yellow and gold colors in the stone mix.’”82
Horace Trumbauer's principal designer for the campus was the gifted Julian F. Abele, the first African American graduate of the University of Pennsylvania's School of Architecture and a former student at the Ecole des Beaux-Arts in Paris. Abele worked closely with James B. Duke while he was alive. The great irony here is that as an African American, had he applied, he would not have been admitted to the university due to his race.83
Different architectural styles were chosen for the two campuses. For the original east campus that became the women's college, the Georgian style was selected. The new buildings included everything needed for self-sufficiency: classrooms, dormitories, a library, auditorium, and other facilities, all organized around a long rectangular north-south mall. For Duke's new west campus, the Gothic style of Princeton and the University of Chicago was selected. The new west campus was laid out in the shape of a cross with the chapel as the head of the cross, the residential buildings as one crossbeam, and classroom buildings as the other. These ornamented, stone buildings have common walls creating a continuous facade and well-defined malls. The bottom section of the cross is a landscaped entrance road leading up the hill to a 275-foot-long chapel at the top of the ridge. The chapel's 210-foot tower dominates the entrance view and dwarfs the surrounding buildings in accordance with the wishes of James B. Duke.
Figure 11. Rendering of Duke University's West Campus by the architectural firm of Horace Trumbauer. The African American architect Julian Abele worked closely with James B. Duke in designing the Gothic-styled campus (courtesy of Duke University Libraries).
The new campus opened in 1930, although many of the buildings were still under construction. The Duke Medical School also opened that year with Wilber Davison, formerly an assistant dean at Johns Hopkins Medical School, as its first dean. At the time it was the only four-year medical program in North Carolina.84 Davison is credited with charting a course that led to Duke's medical school becoming one of the very best in the nation.
During the Great Depression the city of Durham fared better