As the golf cart rolls by, you can hear the tour guides telling prospective students and their parents, “Duke Memorial Hall was built by the Duke brothers in memory of their sister Mary who died as a child while attending New Garden Boarding school.”
You then wonder how that could be possible when the plaque inside Duke Hall dedicates it to Mary Lyons who died in 1893 after having five children.
The Quakers must have looked down on that delinquent student.
The truth is that Duke Memorial Hall does not have as interesting a background as tour guides and history buffs would like it too.
“First, our cool story that the wood chair in the library being the Guilford tree is debunked, now this, another cool story, turns out to not be true,” said Carl Simon, co-coordinator of tours.
Rumor has it that during the 1880s, Benjamin and James Duke wanted to donate enough money to make New Garden Boarding School into a college, but the Quakers did not want to accept money made by the sale of tobacco.
“This story is just a mixed-up combination of two separate stories about the Dukes and boarding schools,” said Max Carter, campus ministry coordinator.
Carter explained that after the Duke family had gained wealth through the tobacco industry, they wished to help the Quaker- and Methodist-based Union Academy, a boarding school in Randolph County, become a college. Supposedly it was the Quakers in Randolph County who refused the tobacco money, but the Methodists on the board out-voted them and accepted the funds.
Even this story may or may not be true. In his book “The Dukes of Durham,” Robert Durden said that Union Academy had already become Trinity College in 1859, and the Duke family was not involved with it until there was a debate in the 1880s over whether the school should be moved to Raleigh or Durham.
Durden claims that it was Benjamin’s and James’ father, Washington, who provided enough funds for Trinity College to be moved to Durham and later renamed Duke University.
The brothers and their sister Mary Duke did attend New Garden Boarding School in 1871. However, the siblings returned home after only one year because they were more focused on the growing tobacco industry.
That was the only association they had with New Garden Boarding School until 1897, almost 10 years after it had become Guilford College.
According to Durden, then-president of Guilford L. L. Hobbs hassled Benjamin Duke for money to fund a much-needed science building. Duke initially refused, saying “we are right heavily burdened with Trinity College at the moment.”
The Duke family changed their mind by the spring and donated $10,000 for the science building, requesting that it be named Memorial Hall in memory of Mary, who had since married and recently died.
“The Story of Guilford College,” a 1934 bulletin by Dorothy Gilbert and the History Committee, says that when President Hobbs announced during chapel that the new building would be constructed thanks to the Duke family’s gift, the students were elated. The announcement caused the boys to cheer and yell in excitement, and “(A new science hall) sounded so good, the girls forgot their college dignity and answered with the others of these novel and catchy yells.”
The Duke family later donated stock from their latest entrepreneurial venture, an electrical company called Duke Power, for Guilford’s endowment, which was followed by two other donations of $15,000 and $25,000 to the college.
Despite the building of Memorial Hall (now Duke Memorial Hall) and these donations, it is safe to say that Guilford was never destined to be Duke University.
“It’s a funny story that seems plausible, but I find it interesting that after telling it all this time, it has been disproved,” said tour guide Sophie Kanter.
It is important to note that the tour guides and others who have told the “Duke Brothers Story” did not intend to be misleading.
“We stress honesty and we do not want to show Guilford for something that it is not,” Simon said. “We treat false stories just like we would treat a wrong figure. For example, if we were to find out that the average class size is 20, not 19, we would relay that onto the tour guides and if we find out the ‘Duke Story’ is wrong, then we tell our tour guides not