History
The Alfred I. duPont Testamentary Trust was created as per Alfred I. duPont's will after his death in 1935. At the time, duPont's assets included seven Florida National Banks, significant landholdings in Northwest Florida, E. I du Pont de Nemours Company shares, and the Nemours and Epping Forest estates. The value of the assets was approximately $40 million. The duPont Trustees, specifically Edward Ball, created the St. Joe Paper Company and began operating a paper mill in 1938. The trust had a 1939 value of $72.5 million.
A federal law was enacted in 1966 that barred non-profit organizations from owning both operating companies and banking institutions. Ed Ball fought the legislation for several years, even testifying before a congressional subcommittee, but in the end, he reluctantly sold the banks.
After Jessie Ball du Pont died in 1970, Ball arranged the sale of Epping Forest to his friend, Raymond K. Mason. Before Charter Company was broken up by bankruptcy in the late 1980s, Mason sold Epping Forest to Herb Peyton and Gate Petroleum in 1984. Peyton is presently a duPont trustee.
Before Ball's death, the trust and foundation signed a 1980 consent agreement with Delaware and Florida which stipulated that the Nemours Foundation would annually receive the greater of: 3 percent of the trust's net market value or the net annual income from the trust assets. Additionally, at least 50 percent of Nemours funds must be spent in Delaware, and a $25 million contingency fund must be reserved for Delaware's operations.
Read more about this topic: Alfred I. Du Pont Testamentary Trust
Famous quotes containing the word history:
“If you look at history youll find that no state has been so plagued by its rulers as when power has fallen into the hands of some dabbler in philosophy or literary addict.”
—Desiderius Erasmus (c. 14661536)
“No one is ahead of his time, it is only that the particular variety of creating his time is the one that his contemporaries who are also creating their own time refuse to accept.... For a very long time everybody refuses and then almost without a pause almost everybody accepts. In the history of the refused in the arts and literature the rapidity of the change is always startling.”
—Gertrude Stein (18741946)
“Postmodernism is, almost by definition, a transitional cusp of social, cultural, economic and ideological history when modernisms high-minded principles and preoccupations have ceased to function, but before they have been replaced with a totally new system of values. It represents a moment of suspension before the batteries are recharged for the new millennium, an acknowledgment that preceding the future is a strange and hybrid interregnum that might be called the last gasp of the past.”
—Gilbert Adair, British author, critic. Sunday Times: Books (London, April 21, 1991)