James Buchanan Duke (1856–1925) tobacco magnate, power developer, and philanthropist

Duke was born near Durham, North Carolina, to Washington and Artelia Roney Duke. He received his basic education in local academies and attended the Eastman Business College in Poughkeepsie, New York. His primary education, however, was in the family’s business: the farming, hand manufacture, and marketing of tobacco products.

In 1884, at the age of 28, Buck, as he was called, opened a branch of the family firm, W. Duke, Sons & Company, in New York City. Within five years the business was furnishing half the country’s production of cigarettes. After a “tobacco war” among the five principal manufacturers, Duke emerged as president of the AMERICAN TOBACCO CO., a tribute to his organizational skills. Through foreign and domestic combinations, this trust controlled the manufacture of a majority of tobacco products. The U.S. Supreme Court dissolved the enterprise under provisions of the SHERMAN ACT in 1911.

By 1892, however, Duke had begun to diversify his interests. His older brother, Benjamin, had launched the family into textiles. As this enterprise grew, a need for economical waterpower led the Dukes into hydroelectric power generation. In 1905, they founded the Southern Power Company. Within two decades, this was supplying electricity through a system of power grids to more than 300 mills, factories, and cities and towns in the Carolinas. It is now Duke Power Company, a part of Duke Energy.

A lifelong Methodist, Duke practiced the financial stewardship encouraged by his church. The family, ardent Republicans and sympathetic to the downtrodden, gave individually and collectively to many causes. Beginning in 1892, Washington Duke had aided a small Methodistrelated institution, Trinity College, and from 1887 Benjamin Duke had been a member of its board of trustees. Continuing the family’s pattern of giving, James B. Duke, its most financially successful member, established the Duke Endowment in 1924. Its primary beneficiary was a university organized around Trinity College. At the urging of the college’s president, William Preston Few, the school was rechartered as Duke University in honor of the family that had long supported it.

In addition, Duke designated income from the endowment to be distributed to nonprofit hospitals and child care institutions for blacks and whites in the Carolinas; to rural Methodist churches and retired Methodist preachers in North Carolina; and to three other educational institutions: Furman University (Greenville, South Carolina), Johnson C. Smith University (Charlotte, North Carolina), and Davidson College (Davidson, North Carolina). Now one of the largest foundations in the United States, the Duke Endowment, with offices in Charlotte, North Carolina, has distributed more than $1.5 billion to its beneficiaries.

After a brief first marriage that ended in divorce, James B. Duke married a widow from Atlanta, Nanaline Holt Inman, in 1907. One daughter, Doris, was born to the couple. James B. Duke died in New York City on October 10, 1925. He is interred with his father and brother Ben in the chapel on the campus of Duke University.

See also UTILITIES.

Further reading

• Durden, Robert F. The Dukes of Durham, 1865–1929. Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 1987. 
• ———. Electrifying the Piedmont Carolinas: The Duke Power Company, 1904–1997. Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 2001. 
• ———. Bold Entrepreneur: A Life of James B. Duke. Durham, N.C.: Carolina Academic Press, 2003. 

Thomas F. Harkins