From Methodist College to Research University

Duke University began in 1838 as a one-room subscription school organized by Methodist and Quaker communities in rural North Carolina, moved and grew under a series of names, and took the name Trinity College in 1859 under the sponsorship of the Methodist Episcopal Church, South. Trinity relocated to Durham in 1892 at the invitation of tobacco and textile money, and in 1924 James Buchanan Duke, whose family had built a fortune in tobacco and hydroelectric power, endowed the institution with a trust that renamed it Duke University in memory of his father, on the condition that it expand into a full research university with graduate and professional schools.

The Methodist connection was never severed outright; Duke Divinity School continues to train clergy, predominantly for the United Methodist Church, and the university's Gothic chapel remains its architectural and ceremonial center. But the 1924 transformation deliberately built a modern research university on top of the older denominational college, and it is that research infrastructure, not the divinity school, that gave Duke its distinctive place in the history of the study of religion: a psychology department willing, in the 1930s, to house a research program that mainstream psychology regarded with open skepticism.