Recorded Event: Guided walking tour Tour Guide: OH Omar Hamad
Recorder: RK Rachel Kirby Date: May 28, 2015
Notes: This was the 12:15pm tour. Attendees on the tour included JR Julia Rogers, an Irish man and woman (IM, IW), AK Anna Killian, and myself. We were joined later on by
additional visitors.
Recording starts briefly after the tour began.
Omar Hamad: Bahama, North Carolina. And his first wife who isn’t pictured here was Mary Carolina Clinton, and then later on Mary passes away in 1847. In 1852 he remarries to Artelia Roney who you see pictured here on the left. And with Artelia he has three children, Mary Duke, Benjamin Duke, and James Buchannan or “Buck” Duke. And I should have mentioned that with his first wife Mary, he had Sydney and Brody. And then in 1858, Sydney and Mary both passed away from typhoid fever.
And so Washington Duke moves to this specific property in 1852, which he inherits from his father in law through Artelia, and he starts out primarily as a subsistence farmer of tobacco, growing enough for the local market. And then around the time of the Civil War, so he served in the Confederate Navy. And then after the Civil War when he was released as a prisoner of war, he walked back from New Bern back here, and we actually had someone reenact that walk just last week. And at that point he decides he wants to switch to the manufacturing side of tobacco. So he starts his first company, the Washington Duke and Sons Company.
And so his first factory was in this corn crib that you’re going to see on the tour here on the right. Then later, he moved to his second factory which was in a converted horse stable, and then finally in 1869 he moves to this building on the left which was his third factory. And finally, in 1874, he shifted the center of his operations to downtown Durham.
And so during the 1870s he was primarily producing pipe tobacco under the brand name Pro Bono Publico. And then by the 1880s he started switching over to the manufacturing of cigarettes. And by 1890, he forced his three major competitors to merge with him and found the American Tobacco Company which constituted the Tobacco Trust and
dominated the tobacco industry in the United States until 1911 when it was broken up by the Sherman Anti-Trust Act. And I’ll talk to you guys a little bit more about that in detail as we go along to different buildings on the tour.
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Rachel Kirby: And, I want to introduce myself really quickly, if that’s okay. My name is Rachel Kirby, I’m a graduate student at UNC and I’m doing my thesis work with Duke
Homestead about historic interpretations. Do you all mind if I’m taking notes and recording this tour?
Irish Woman: Of course not. Irish Man: Please do.
RK: Okay. Thank you.
Julia Rogers: I’ll let you guys go.
[Conversation begins as we walk towards the curing barn. At times, conversation is inaudible]. OH: So you guys traveling through the local area?
IM: No, we’re from visiting here from Ireland. OH: Where in Ireland?
IM: Near Dublin.
OH: I watched an interesting documentary recently, I forget the guy who did it but it was called [inaudible]. This guy went around Ireland and was trying to figure out if anybody still speaks Irish as a living language. He wanted to see if you could go around the country and only get by speaking to people speaking Irish. And he walked around Dublin 95% of the people looked at him like he was speaking pig Latin.
IM: It depends on the---.
OH: I tried showing it to my girlfriend but she got sick of it after two episodes. She was like, this is hopeless.
IM: it depends on what age they are because---. OH: Yeah.
IM: ---At our school, we all spoke Irish. But now, the kids don’t have to do it. It’s not compulsory, and they have less interest in it really---.
OH: I feel like it’s probably like us in the United States trying to learn Latin or something. I know some people speak it.
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IM: There is a TV program in Irish, which is quite good. It’s state run, of course. OH: I only know like [….felta?]
JR: Slow down a little bit. [inaudible]
OH: Yeah, but it was a good documentary. I think the guys name, I’m blanking on it now. IM: He wasn’t a comedian, was he?
OH: I think he was the granddaughter of Shelia Humphrey’s or something like that.
IM: There was a young American guy who traveled, comedian. I can’t think of his name. He learned Irish… [Inaudible]
[04.35.98]
OH: So the first building that you see here on the tour, this is the tobacco curing barn and the barn dates to 1870. It’s not original to this property. It was moved from another tobacco farm here in North Carolina.
So your process of producing the tobacco was a labor intensive and time intensive
process. It was also called the thirteen month crop. And so, yeah, like I said it would take about a year between the time you would start preparing your fields to the time you would harvest your tobacco. You would start preparing your fields in the fall and be ready to plant your tobacco seedlings by December. And in the mean time you would be topping, and suckering, and worming your leaves. And finally when you were ready to harvest your tobacco you would carry your leaves from the field and then place them… [OH pauses as he walks to the side of the curing barn].
…Inside of what’s called, in this thing here, which is your tobacco sled. And then from the tobacco sled you would carry your leaves from the field and then tie them around the looping horse you see right here. And then from the looping horse, the tobacco would be hung up in sticks inside of the curing barn. So inside of the curing barn, this is what’s also known as flu cured tobacco. And so, your flues are connected to a central furnace, and that furnace would be heated at about 180 degrees and you would heat it for about five or six days. And so eventually after its been heated for that long, it’s going to turn this bright golden color that you see right here, which is where the term bright leaf
tobacco originates, which is the specialty type of tobacco from the area. Some other kinds of tobacco that you have burley tobacco, fire cured tobacco, and in Louisiana you have perique tobacco. And so like I said, it’s going to take on this consistency right here.
126 IW: So it dries in a week?
OH: Yeah. About five or six days for the curing process. And so, after that when you are getting it ready for market.
[OH begins walking as he talks]
OH: The next place that you take it would be the packing house. [Inaudible, people talking in the background as we walk]
IM: Is this the actual place?
OH: This was their property. They worked on this property from…. [inaudible] [07.22.09]
OH: And so, this building was called the packing house. And so, once your tobacco had finished curing after it was in the curing barn, the leaves would be very dry and brittle. So you would want to allow the leaves to get moist before you would send them off to market. So you would place them down inside what’s called the ordering pit. You would allow them to get moist overnight. And then once you’d done that you would take the leaves out and place them over here on what’s called the grading bench.
[08.07.637]
OH: And so you’d want to grade each leaf according to size, color, and texture, with the brightest leaves being the most favorable. And then once you’d done that, you would take the prettiest leaf and wrap them around the rest of the leaves and that’s what you call a hand of tobacco. And then you’d send them off to market. And the hands when be stored in this room up here, and that’s how they would be sent off to market.
And so, like I said earlier. Originally Washington Duke, before the Civil War, he’s primarily just a subsistence yeomen farm of tobacco. So during the Civil War he served in the Navy and his son Sydney who was too young to serve in the army, he was only 16, served as a prison guard in Salisbury, North Carolina.
After the war, that’s when Washington Duke really decides he really wants to get into the manufacturing side of tobacco. And so after walking back from New Bern to Durham, he goes into business, in the tobacco manufacturing, and started the first tobacco factory which you see was in that corn crib over there on the right.
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Then later on he moved to a second factory which was in a horse stable that’s not here anymore. And then finally in 1869, he moved to the factory over here that you see on the left. And so that’s where he had his main center of operations until he moved into
downtown Durham in 1874.
So we can go ahead and go on to the third factory.
[Discussion of the tour. Difficult to understand in full. Anna Killian talking about Duke having 60 cents in his pocket, but not wanting to portray it as a rags to riches story, and about the Soldier’s Walk Home reenactment. Anna Killian is talking with the Irish Woman, and Omar Hamad is talking with the Irish Man].
[11.01.165 sound of the door of the third factory being opened]
OH: And if you guys get too humid in here, I know it’s getting hot outside. If you need me to go outside to talk to you about the stuff I’m talking about in here, just let me know and I’d be happy to do that.
Yeah, I know the aroma of tobacco is just wafting out. So this was their third factory, and like I said it does date to 1869. So originally they were primarily making pipe tobacco here under the brand name Pro Bono Publico. So when you were producing your pipe tobacco, you would have your bundle of tobacco leaves right here. First you would flail them with the sassafras leaves you see right here. This was supposed to give your tobacco an added sweetness, like the sassafras that we find in root beer. Then you would want to take out the stems and place it inside the sieve here. And you would want to grind it up to a finer consistency. And then eventually you would want it to be this fine consistency like you see here inside of the muslin sack. And so this was how your tobacco would be placed inside of a pipe.
And so, around the 1880s that’s when the Duke Company starts switching over to the manufacturing of cigarettes. So originally the Duke family is hesitant to manufacture cigarettes for a couple of primary reasons. One was that cigarette smoking at this time wasn’t widespread in the United States. It was still seen as more of a European
phenomenon. Second was that the people who were primarily specializing in the hand- rolling of cigarettes at this time were eastern European Jewish immigrants. So you would have to recruit laborers from that background to come from New York to North Carolina and hand roll the cigarettes. And I think they generally could roll about 3 cigarettes a minute using that process.
What really revolutionized the process was, I think in 1881, a guy named James Bonsack invented the Bonsack Machine. So using the Bonsack Machine you could now produce over 100 cigarettes a minute which was far more efficient.
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So the way that the Duke Company capitalized on this process, was that they went out and found the guy with the patent for the machine, a guy named Tim O’Brien. And they asked him to make an exclusive contract with their company. By doing that, they were able to monopolize cigarette manufacturing. By 1890 they were able to force their competitors to merge with them and form the American Tobacco Company. As I said earlier the company dominates cigarette manufacturing in the US until 1911 when it was broken up by the Sherman Antitrust Act. At which point it broke up and split into several different companies.
So after the company was broken up, the Dukes had already made a substantial amount of their wealth so they invested in different companies. They invested in several different industries. They invested in textiles, investing in a number of the textile mills in North Carolina. They invested in energy. Later on money that they used helped to found the Duke Energy Company. And of course, most famously in 1924 they did make an
endowment of $40-million dollars to a small Methodist college called Trinity College, as the Dukes were devout Methodists, and that changed its name to Duke University. [14.46.575]
OH: Do you guys have any questions?
Female Visitor 1: Did they start their manufacturing of textiles because of the fact they were making bags?
OH: I’m not sure about that. Aside from tobacco, textiles was the other major industry prominent in the piedmont of North Carolina. Like were already the Holts in Alamance County, and other families had several local mills. I think that was the big thing to get into. So after they got out of tobacco, I think that was the natural place for them to turn to.
I’d also like to point out, if you look over there you’ll see that barrel-like object over there. That’s called a hogs head and that’s what you’ll use to transport tobacco during the colonial times.
IM: What went through the screen was waste?
Anna Killian: No, what went through the screen was the tobacco itself. The finer stuff is what you would smoke.
IM: Small and leafy. Very fine, wasn’t it? OH: Yeah, very fine.
IW: [inaudible] …plug tobacco for pipes was moist, sold in squares of hard tobacco. Known as leaf.
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JR: We actually have a plug press in the museum. It’s kind of standing there without any
interpretation. But if you went back around the back of the museum near the photograph museum. There is a giant plug press back in there. So they literally made cakes and compacted all of the tobacco together.
OH: So whenever you guys are ready we can go on to the house. IM: Warm day in here working.
[People talking about their father being a smoker. Conversation as we move towards the house]
OH: And so, here you see the house where the family would have been living between 1852 and 1874. [difficult to hear] and the kitchen was separate and added on in 1860. [others talking as we walk] And here you can see the root cellar… [too far away to hear] [...]
OH: This is where they would be getting their water for various chores around the farm. And then over here on the right would be their smoke house.
[OH inaudible at this time]
OH:And then if you follow me all the way to the far right. You will see our small vineyard which his growing scuppernong grapes, native to North Carolina.
[…] [Group joins us as we enter the house]
OH: And so, here in the kitchen one of the first things you’ll notice is the stove here in the center. Originally they were cooking in the fire place, and I believe the stove was added in 1870. If you’ll notice closely, you’ll see the word “success” is written on the stove. This is the Duke family’s way of letting people know that they were a little better-off than the typical subsistence farming family in North Carolina. When they moved into this house they were still a modest farming family. As they accumulated more wealth from tobacco they would have ways like this to let people know that they were successful. You’ll note here on the left and the right, the pie safes that they were using to store most of their food. And if you look closely you’ll see small holes that allow air to help the food maintain consistency. But they’re small enough so that insects can’t get in there and cause the food to spoil.
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Some other things you see. The oil lamps you see here would be the primary source of light in the house. My favorite item in the kitchen is the corn husk mop that they would have used to sweep around here. And if you look over the door you see the hunting rifle that they would have used to hunt wild game in the area that they would have used to supplement the diet. Some other objects you note around here. Behind Anna right there is the old fashioned coffee grinder they would have used for their morning cup of Joe. And then, the mortar and pestle and the butter churner over here to the left. And whenever you’re ready we can go on into the dining room.
[20.53.784]
[inaudible question]
JR: That actually is, we have a volunteer who does woodworking and he keeps those tools here. They’re not old but they’re designed. He was here this previous Saturday doing some demonstrations. If you notice the little curlys outside, those are all leftover because they’re great for starting fires with.
OH: And so here in the dining room, you’ll note all the wood here that you see on the side, this is all heart of pine from pine trees here in North Carolina. And so obviously at the dining room table is where they would have served their meals. And also the Duke children, if they had homework would have sat here to do school work. And usually in the corner we have a sewing machine on display, but it’s not here right now. You can still see the sewing kit in the corner. This represents Mary Duke’s role in the family. She would have