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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). The Duke Endowment Archives span the years 1902 to 2022, with the bulk of the material dating from 1925 through 2006. 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 majority of the records are arranged into series that reflect the organization of the institution, including the Board of Trustees, Treasurer's Office, Controller's Office, Investment Office, Education Division and Committee on Communications, Health Care and Child Care Divisions, and Rural Church Division. Smaller series, documenting such other activities as record-keeping, publications, and history of The Endowment, include: Central Files, Oral History Project, Trust Under Will, Publications, Miscellaneous, Photographic Materials, and Audiovisual Materials. The collection consists of the following types of materials: correspondence; minutes of meetings; financial records; applications for assistance from hospitals, child care institutions, and churches; statistics; publications; oral history tapes and transcripts; architectural drawings and blueprints; photographs; audio cassettes; and miscellaneous records and papers. The geographic focus is primarily North Carolina and South Carolina.