Duke Homestead: Where the Tobacco Empire Began

Washington Duke came to this farm in eighteen fifty-two, building the substantial farmhouse that still stands here in anticipation of his second marriage. He was an Orange County farmer with modest means and no particular destiny until Union soldiers passed through at the end of the Civil War and discovered, as the story goes, the local Bright Leaf tobacco. They helped themselves and then wrote back for more.

Duke recognized an opening. He and his children set up a small processing factory in a log outbuilding on the homestead, hand-labeling their smoking tobacco with the phrase Pro Bono Publico, Latin for for the public good. His son Brodie moved to Durham first, and the rest of the family followed in eighteen seventy-four. Within a decade they had adopted mechanical cigarette production and were on their way to building the American Tobacco Company, which would eventually control most of the cigarette market in the United States. The homestead where it started is now a state historic site, a quiet farm that set the American South on a path it is still following.