He electrified the Piedmont
Plus: Top news of the week—Arrest in 1990 cold case; Lowe’s cuts 600 jobs; Scotland picks Charlotte for World Cup training; Shots fired into Huntersville candidate’s house; Council backs I-77 delay
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James Buchanan ‘Buck’ Duke turned a tobacco machine into a monopoly, a river into a power grid, and Charlotte into the command center of a Southern empire
Editor’s note: You see their names on street signs or parks, but who were some of the big-name people from decades ago who shaped Charlotte? They have fascinating stories, and for the next few Saturdays, we’re sharing them with you.
by John Short
Most of the barons of the Gilded Age left a legacy of sprawling estates and dusty portraits.
James Buchanan “Buck” Duke left behind the infrastructure of modern life in Charlotte and the Carolinas. If you are reading this, you likely are doing so under lights powered by his namesake utility, perhaps with a degree from (or strong opinion about) a university he funded, and supported by a regional economy he jump-started.
But before he was the architect of the Carolinas, Duke was a high-stakes magnate who rose from the North Carolina red clay to turn a cheap crop into a monopoly and a machine into a philanthropic dynasty.
The Bonsack gamble and the tobacco war
Born in 1856 outside of Durham, Duke grew up in a hard working and industrious Methodist family. His formal education as a youth featured brief stints at the New Garden School (now Guilford College) and the Eastman Business College in Poughkeepsie, N.Y.
However, “Buck” Duke received his most enduring education by rolling up his sleeves alongside his father, Washington Duke, and his elder brother, Benjamin, in the family business of farming and selling tobacco.
After the Civil War, many Confederate veterans like Duke’s father returned home with limited options and took to the tobacco fields of the countryside to scrape together a living. From humble beginnings peddling tobacco from a cart across Eastern North Carolina, the Dukes’ enterprise expanded over the years into the full tobacco supply chain by growing, harvesting, curing and selling the plant.
Once the enterprise had grown, the Dukes opened a tobacco processing and cigarette factory in Durham in 1874 to expand into the final stage of the cigarette supply chain, placing them among the first cigarette manufacturers in the South. By the early 1880s, Buck and his brother Benjamin were running the tobacco firm, W. Duke, Sons and Co., quite successfully.
Around this time, Duke moved from Durham to New York to oversee the expanding business, and while there in 1883 came across a mechanized contraption that was the brainchild of an inventor named James A. Bonsack. “The Bonsack Machine” was the result of an 1880 contest to find a practical cigarette-making machine. The machine had won the competition but was not put into production due to minor technical deficiencies. Despite its flaws, Duke saw the machine’s potential and negotiated a contract with Bonsack, ultimately installing the machines in the W. Duke, Sons and Co. factory in Durham in 1884.
This gamble on technology and innovation paid off, and once the machine was working smoothly, Duke scaled his cigarette production from a hand-roller’s output of a few cigarettes per minute to 120,000 cigarettes per day, which previously would have required up to 40 hand-rollers working non-stop.
This revolutionary production improvement enabled the mass production of cigarettes virtually overnight, and suddenly Duke found himself confronting a new challenge: how to sell this glut of all these machine-produced cigarettes he just created. For this problem, Duke turned not to technology, but to advertising, an approach for which there seemed to be no bad ideas.
The company placed ads in the burgeoning medium of magazines as they were gaining popularity, sponsored sporting events and handed out cigarettes for free to the contestants in beauty contests. There wasn’t an event that Duke didn’t consider to be a marketing opportunity, and the company became a pioneer in national cigarette advertising, including innovations such as tradable “cigarette pictures” (an early precursor to baseball cards) and billboards.
This advertising was everywhere, and it sometimes made outlandish claims about the health benefits of smoking, but the resulting sales were massive. Duke’s manufacturing advantage enabled him to compete on price against his competitors still using hand-rolling, and by 1890, at the ripe old age of 33, he had acquired and consolidated the rival “Big Five” tobacco firms to create a monopoly, the American Tobacco Co., which controlled about 90% of all cigarette production in the United States.
The great pivot: from smoke to spark
As Duke’s tobacco monopoly was crushing the competition and drawing attention from trust-busting regulators in the early 1900s, Duke was already dabbling in his next business opportunity: harnessing the power of the Catawba River.
As the legend goes, Duke visited a doctor, W. Gill Wylie, about a foot injury and happened to strike up a conversation with Wylie about the hydroelectric potential of the South. Wylie was a bit of a true believer in hydroelectricity, and his deep knowledge inspired Duke to envision providing abundant and cheap electricity to the textile mills and industry all along a mighty Southeastern power corridor, decades before the federal government’s investments in the Tennessee Valley Authority.
Duke believed that lasting growth and prosperity in the South would require this cheap, abundant electricity, especially in textile-producing regions. In support of this vision, Duke bought land, built dams and persuaded risk-averse mill owners to use the new source of energy.
Alongside Wylie and the highly regarded engineer William States Lee, Duke founded the Southern Power Co. in 1905 in Charlotte, which was the leading electric utility in the western Carolinas. Ultimately, the work of Southern Power in the region led to the damming of rivers that created Lake Wylie, Lake Norman and Mountain Island Lake. This firm would sustain and grow into what today is known throughout the Southeast as Duke Energy.
The railroad era
By 1910, Duke realized that owning the power plants wasn’t enough — he needed to own the “metabolism” of the region. And he viewed the streetcars and transportation networks as the way to take the next step for his vision.
The centerpiece of this vision was the Piedmont & Northern (P&N) railroad. While the established Southern Railway relied on bulky, soot-spewing steam engines, Duke’s P&N was a sleek, electric interurban line. It was a physical manifestation of his dominance: a railroad powered by his own dams, carrying cotton to mills that ran on his electricity, moving workers who lived in neighborhoods lit by his grids.
In 1910, Duke’s Southern Power acquired the Charlotte streetcar lines and added them to the portfolio of other regional lines through the Southern Public Utilities Co. (SPU) From Gastonia to Spartanburg, Duke had cobbled together a unified network of industry, connecting textile mills, population centers and, of course, the power stations of the Southern Power Co.
The Charlotte years and the 150-foot fountain
In 1919, Duke brought his empire to Charlotte in a way that the city couldn’t ignore. He purchased a home in Myers Park and tripled it in size, creating a 45-room, 12-bath majestic mansion he called “Lynnwood” (now known as the Duke Mansion).
It was reported that Duke’s wife found Charlotte far less entertaining than the Gilded Age society hubs of New York or Newport, R.I., but Duke viewed the mansion as a strategic headquarters close to his booming business interests.
It was also where he sought to entertain his 7-year-old daughter, Doris. Duke preferred to raise Doris in the South and invested in her life in Charlotte. He installed an enormous fountain on the grounds of the mansion that spouted water up to 150 feet into the air, which became a popular local attraction as Charlotteans flocked to see “Buck Duke Fountain.”
The ‘Poor Little Rich Girl’ and the sunroom deal
The mansion was also the site of the creation of Duke’s most lasting legacy, the Duke Endowment.
In December 1924, Duke signed the papers to establish one of the largest private foundations in the United States while in the sunroom of the Mansion. The Endowment, a $40M gift — over $700M in today’s money — was very prescriptive on the uses of the funds: 46% to higher education, 32% for hospitals, 10% devoted to orphan care and 12% for Methodist causes, and all entirely for donations in the Carolinas. These funds transformed Durham’s small Trinity College into Duke University and would later lay the groundwork for the growth of Davidson College, Furman University and Johnson C. Smith University.
Just 10 short months after signing the region-altering gift to the Carolinas, James B. Duke died from a blood illness at age 68. The spotlight immediately shifted to 12-year-old Doris, who became the “Million-Dollar Baby.” The press hounded her as the “Poor Little Rich Girl,” a narrative of a lonely heiress burdened by the weight of her father’s millions.
A powerful legacy
The mansion still stands today, having been saved from development into condos by the Ray family and the Lynnwood Foundation. Today, it serves as a historic inn and event space, a reminder of when Charlotte was the capital of a private industrial empire, and the opulent home of a rags-to-riches character.
James “Buck” Duke was both a ruthless monopolist who crushed his rivals and a visionary philanthropist who built the social fabric of two states. He didn’t just participate in the economy of Charlotte; he engineered it.
In 2015, Duke was memorialized with a statue along the Charlotte Trail of History, with marker No. 20 along the Sugar Creek Greenway near Midtown.
John Short is a freelance writer and co-host of The Charlotte Podcast who loves digging up Charlotte’s past and pondering its future. Say hey when you see him on the streetcar.
Today’s supporting sponsor is Ginkgo Residential. A focused strategy in workforce rental housing across North and South Carolina. Ginkgo REIT provides tax-efficient income, portfolio diversification, and long-term capital appreciation. Next closing March 1st.
DEADLINE EXTENDED: Get your nominations in for 40 Over 40 by tonight
The nomination deadline for The Charlotte Ledger’s 40 Over 40 Awards has been extended to 11:59 p.m. tonight, Saturday, Feb. 21, after the submission form was temporarily down Friday because of a network outage. Here are the rules and criteria for nominations.
The 40 Over 40 Awards, presented by U.S. Bank, honor people making a real difference in our community during what many call their “second act.” If you know someone 40 or older who lives or works in Charlotte and deserves the spotlight, nominate them today.
This week in Charlotte: Meet Charlotte’s planning chief; NoDa vendors face uncertain future; Where the most parking tickets come from; Front Porch Sunday moves to FreeMoreWest; LaMelo Ball crashes in uptown
On Saturdays, The Ledger sifts through the local news of the week and links to the top articles — even if they appeared somewhere else. We’ll help you get caught up. That’s what Saturdays are for.
Politics
Primary ballots: The latest Charlotte Ledger podcast breaks down the 2026 Democratic and Republican primaries in Mecklenburg County, including key races for U.S. Senate, Congress, state legislature, judgeships, county commission and sheriff. The primary is March 3, with early voting running through February 28.
Council members support I-77 delay: At least five Charlotte City Council members (Malcolm Graham, Joi Mayo, JD Mazuera Arias, Victoria Watlington and James Mitchell) say they would like the N.C. Department of Transportation to slow down on plans for expanding I-77 near uptown, as residents worry about the effect on their neighborhoods, environmental group Sustain Charlotte said on Tuesday.
Shots fired into Huntersville candidate’s house: (Observer) The home of a Republican candidate for Mecklenburg County commissioner was shot into on Monday night, police said. Aaron Marin, who is running for the District 1 seat on the county commission, said the shots were fired into his Huntersville house when he was inside with his wife and two sons.
Local news
Meet Charlotte’s planning chief: (Ledger🔒) The Ledger caught up with Monica Holmes, the city’s planning director, to talk about growth, transit, zoning and what’s next for Charlotte. Read the full Q&A for her perspective on how the city is changing and where it’s headed.
Where the most parking tickets come from: (Ledger🔒) A Ledger analysis shows a handful of uptown blocks account for a large share of parking tickets citywide. Ticket revenue has surged since Charlotte extended meter hours to 10 p.m., with citations nearly doubling in recent months.
Arrest made in 1990 cold case: (Observer, subscriber-only) Charlotte police say a longtime suspect has been arrested in the 1990 killing of Kim Thomas Friedland, who was found slain in her Cotswold home. Investigators say new DNA technology helped link the former handyman to the decades-old crime.
Front Porch Sundays moves to the westside: (Instagram) The South End market announced it is relocating to the west side, partnering with FreeMoreWest after a decade in Atherton Mill.
Business
NoDa vendors face uncertain future: (Ledger 🔒) Street vendors pushed back at a public input meeting after Charlotte ended its NoDa vending pilot, leaving artists and small sellers without a clear legal path to operate.
Lowe’s cuts 600 jobs: (Observer, subscriber-only) The Mooresville-based home improvement giant confirmed on Friday that it eliminated about 600 corporate and support roles, a small share of its overall workforce but a blow to the Charlotte region.
Sports
Scotland selects Charlotte: (Press Release) In a Tuesday press release, Charlotte FC announced its East Charlotte training complex will serve as the Scotland National Team’s training base camp for the 2026 FIFA World Cup.
LaMelo Ball in uptown crash: (ESPN) Charlotte Hornets point guard LaMelo Ball was involved in a two-car crash on Wednesday afternoon but was not injured, according to a source. One person was treated for minor injuries.
From the Ledger family of newsletters
Wednesday (🔒)
After an abnormal mammogram, a battle for care. Plus: Street vendors sound off; Primary turnout is down; Toppman reviews “The Flick”; Some city council members seek to slow I-77 plan; Shots fired into commissioner candidate’s home; Scotland in east Charlotte
Friday (🔒)
Charlotte’s parking-ticket traps. Plus: How CMPD is using AI; Camp North End’s future; Podcast with Charlotte Economics Club president; Arrest made in high-profile cold case; Scout Motors says HQ still a go
Ways of Life (🔒)
In memoriam: Vito Marsicano, a loving husband and father. Also remembered: An accomplished ballroom dancer; a longtime YMCA staffer and camp director; an assistant principal at Alexander Graham Middle; a Scouting commissioner
‘The Flick’ goes off-stage and out of earshot: The play has two remaining showings today at Independent Picture House, 4237 Raleigh St.
Can Camp North End hang onto its vibe? Plus: More finance jobs for uptown?; Sitting down with Charlotte’s new(ish) chief planner; Sports tenant at Legacy Union; Enderly Park apartments; Rezoning petitions approved
10 things to know ahead of Charlotte FC’s opener: To prepare for today’s opener in St. Louis, catch up on the latest with the team’s stars — plus what the World Cup means for the schedule, previewing the match and more.