The collection documents the administration of the corpus of the trust and the charitable contributions made to the categories of recipients named in the Indenture and Deed of Trust establishing The Endowment. The Duke Endowment Archives span the years 1902 to 2006, with the bulk of the material dating from 1925 through 2006. The Duke Endowment was established by James Buchanan Duke as a perpetual charitable trust in 1924, with the following types of beneficiaries, mainly residing in North Carolina and South Carolina: non-profit hospitals and child care institutions educational institutions and rural churches of the Conference of the Methodist Episcopal Church, South (now the United Methodist Church).
