WORKING@DUKE
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STEAM PLANT GOES QUIET
Once a year over the summer, Duke’s steam plant shuts down for a maintenance makeover in preparation for the winter months.
NEWS YOU CAN USE
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PROFESSIONAL DEVELOPMENT
Duke staff member advances with skills attained through Professional Development Institute training.
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Spooky Duke Tales
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SUSTAINABLE DUKE
A Duke Fuqua School of Business professor collects waste oil, which is refined in Pittsboro as biodiesel, to fuel his car.
October 2007
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he spirit of Halloween is alive at Duke. There’s the Memorial Chapel that serves as the permanent resting place for members of the Duke family. There’s the mysterious tombstone found on campus. And there are those spectacular and sometimes spooky stone gargoyles inspired by Gothic architecture, peering year-round from their perches atop buildings. What would Halloween at Duke be without a few historical tales?
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Mollie Keel, coordinator of Chapel events, recalls a time several years ago when a visitor with a digital camera asked, “Did you know there are ghosts in the Chapel?” She chuckled. The visitor showed her the picture of the altar in the downstairs Chapel crypt, where former Duke presidents, including William Preston Few, Duke’s first president, and Nanaline Duke, wife of Duke’s founder and benefactor, James B. Duke, are buried. Off to the left of the photograph was a white blur, a reflection. “He said not to worry, that we had good ghosts down here,” Keel said. After James B. Duke died in 1925, his friend, James A. Thomas, organized a drive to fund projects in memory of Duke and his family. One project was to add a memorial chapel and crypt to the plans for the Chapel, which opened in 1932. Between the Memorial Chapel and the chancel, a flight of steps descends to the crypt, constructed in Romanesque style with rounded arches and space in the floor for 20 bodies. Above the crypt and behind iron gates in the Chapel is the Memorial Chapel, where the gleaming white marble coffins, known as sarcophagi, of James B. Duke; his father, Washington Duke; and brother Benjamin Duke, have rested since 1935 when their bodies were moved from the mausoleum at Maplewood Cemetery in Durham to the Chapel. A story appeared in the Boston Evening Transcript in 1935, describing the three sarcophagi carved from 33 tons of Italian marble by sculptor Charles Keck in Cambridge, Mass. At the time, the project cost $55,000, and the sarcophagi, weighing 20 tons, were brought to Durham on three trucks. “It’s really an honor to the Duke family, and Duke family philanthropy,” said Tom Harkins, associate university archivist. “There aren’t too many universities in the country today that have as close a connection with the founding family as we do.”
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Cover: The photo of the “Ghost Chapel,” a description based on the reflection of the Chapel, is from the 1951 “Chanticleer,” Duke’s undergraduate yearbook. Bottom Right: Kim Sims, technical services archivist for University Archives, wants to help find the home for a 112-year-old headstone found on campus.
2007 Gold Medal, Internal Periodical Staff Writing 2007 Bronze Medal, Print Internal Audience Tabloids/Newsletters
Kim Sims, technical services archivist for University Archives, keeps a piece of history on her desk. It’s a 26-inch tall tombstone for Emily Johnson, who died in 1895. The headstone was found on campus in the late 1960s to early 1970s. Despite attempts to find its home, no one knows where the tombstone originated, and nothing about Johnson, who is described on it as “mother.” “What I do want to do is to contact the folks at the Duke Forest office to see if they have a record of a cemetery location from the same time >> See SPOOKY TALES, BACK PAGE
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