Nanaline Holt Inman Duke

Mrs. Duke was born in 1871 in Macon, Ga., the daughter of Judge Thaddeus G. Holt. She was the widow of a wealthy Atlanta-based cotton merchant, William Inman, with whom she had a son, Walker P. Inman, in 1894. She married James Buchanan Duke in 1907, and their daughter Doris was born in 1912. “Nannie” was described as a self-possessed beauty, a Southern steel magnolia, who spent her time between the South, New York City and Newport, R.I., where the family spent summers by the sea. Mr. Duke appointed her as one of his original Trustees of the Endowment, and she served on the Board of Trustees more than three decades, until 1957. Nanaline Duke died of bronchial pneumonia in 1962 at Manhattan’s Stanhope Hotel, where she’d been living since moving out of the three story, 32-room Fifth Avenue mansion she and Mr. Duke once called home. She was buried alongside her husband and his brother Benjamin Duke and father Washington Duke in the Crypt in Memorial Chapel on the campus of Duke University.