City: Durham, NC

Category: Tours & Attractions

Telephone: (919) 477-5498

Address: 2828 Duke Homestead Rd.

Description: In the aftermath of the Civil War, Washington Duke was a poor farmer who changed his luck. Just as he switched from growing cotton to cultivating bright-leaf tobacco, the small town of Durham near his farm was gaining a reputation as a tobacco manufacturing center. The company Duke and his sons founded went on to perfect the mechanized production of cigarettes in the 1880s and became the largest tobacco company in the country, the American Tobacco Company, by 1890. Visitors to the Duke Homestead can see where the enterprise, which eventually endowed and renamed Duke University, began. The plain white farmhouse that Washington Duke built in 1850 still stands, alongside a smokehouse and grape arbors, and barns and outbuildings where tobacco was stored and processed by the Duke family. Also on site are displays explaining the agricultural process of growing and curing tobacco. The Homestead presents a Harvest and Hornworm Festival every September, where costumed interpreters demonstrate agricultural practices and an auctioneer calls out tobacco prices. Other events are scheduled throughout the year. Admission to the site and events is free.