Trinity: Where Duke University Was Born

In eighteen thirty-eight, a community school called Brown's Schoolhouse opened in Randolph County. It became Union Institute, then Normal College, and in eighteen fifty-nine was renamed Trinity College by its Methodist sponsors. For more than three decades Trinity operated here in the Piedmont, offering a classical education to the sons of the Carolina countryside.

Then in eighteen ninety-two, the tobacco industrialists Washington Duke and Julian Carr offered a massive endowment to move the college to Durham. Trinity relocated, taking its name and faculty with it. In nineteen twenty-four, Duke's son James B.

Duke pledged forty million dollars and the trustees renamed the institution Duke University. The small Randolph County town that nursed it from a country schoolhouse still goes by Trinity, a quiet reminder that one of the South's great research universities started life in a field not far from here.