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This is the first scholarly biography of James B. Duke and traces his rise from a hardworking boyhood on a farm just outside the village of Durham to his preeminence in the American tobacco industry by 1900. Having first led the family firm of W. Duke, Sons and Company to gamble most successfully on machine-made cigarettes, he went on to take the lead in the organization of the American Tobacco Company in 1890. Proving to be a genius at organizing and managing the vast tobacco combination, he then invaded Britain in 1901 and ended up leading a new globe-spanning British-American Tobacco Company.
Because of his strong desire to promote the industrialization of his native region, he moved into the new field of hydroelectricity in 1905, with the resulting Southern Power Company becoming the Duke Power Company in the 1920s.
After a decade of careful planning, he announced the establishment of The Duke Endowment in late 1924. Based primarily on a large portion of his stock in Duke Power, the Endowment had as its prime beneficiary a new research university - Duke University - to be organized around Trinity College, with which the Duke family had become increasingly involved after 1890. Three other colleges would also receive support from the Endowment, as would health care and child care for both races in the Carolinas and the rural Methodist Church in North Carolina. Entrepreneurial to the end, J. B. Duke capped his career with a large, generous plan for a lasting legacy to the Carolinas.
