History
Starting in 1893, "Buck" Duke started to buy land next to the Raritan River in rural New Jersey. His vision was to create a farm similar to those in North Carolina where he had grown up. He engaged a number of architects and engineers to fulfill his dream including Buckenham & Miller, James Greenleaf and Elizabeth Biddle Shipman. Eventually he had assembled about 2,700 acres (11 km²) of farm and wood lands that contained 45 buildings, 9 lakes, 18 miles of roads and 1.5 miles of stone walls.
Duke died in 1925, and his 12-year old daughter, Doris Duke, gained control of the property after suing her mother. She restored it and moved in at the age of fifteen. She was very invested in the property and made it her main residence. She incorporated innovative ecological farming methods she learned from Louis Bromfield's Malabar Farm. Starting in 1958 she created and designed over a five-year period a unique botanical display in the Horace Trumbauer conservatory and greenhouses known as Duke Gardens. Duke Gardens opened to the public in 1964. Doris Duke died in 1993.
Read more about this topic: Duke Farms
Famous quotes containing the word history:
“History takes time.... History makes memory.”
—Gertrude Stein (1874–1946)
“The history of medicine is the history of the unusual.”
—Robert M. Fresco, and Jack Arnold. Prof. Gerald Deemer (Leo G. Carroll)
“We don’t know when our name came into being or how some distant ancestor acquired it. We don’t understand our name at all, we don’t know its history and yet we bear it with exalted fidelity, we merge with it, we like it, we are ridiculously proud of it as if we had thought it up ourselves in a moment of brilliant inspiration.”
—Milan Kundera (b. 1929)