George Mitchell Duke

Mitchell Duke recalls memories of Hopkins Chapel Area
By MaryBeth Carpenter

Known to friends as Mitchell, George Mitchell Duke offered his reminiscences for the Zebulon Memory Project in March 2000. He passed away on December 1, 2020.

George Mitchell Duke, the son of Charlie Irvin Duke and Annie Horton Duke, was born on February 25, 1925 and recently shared some memories on his life growing up across the street from the cotton gin and sawmill in Hopkins Chapel area.

“I chopped and stored wood, and brought in water for a kerosene stove heater – that was the only way we had hot water – and poured it into a big galvanized tub,” he recalls. He worked in the cotton gin and recalls sending cotton up to the gin in pipes at age 12.

In the gin’s heyday they produced 2,000 bales a year. “We’d gin the cotton for people, but the seed belonged to us.” The toll was 5 percent of the cotton plus the seeds. “We sold the seeds by volume to the Clayton Oil and Milling Company.”

Mitchell’s mother died at age 4, leaving his father to raise five children by himself. “It impacted my life, and made things very hard.” As a child, he recalls playing marbles, and when he was lucky enough to win a glass one, it was quite a prize. “Most of our marbles were dirt.”  For recreation, he remembers rolling a 10 inch tire rim with a clothes hanger. When he helped at the mill, his grandfather G.W. Duke would give him a nickel to buy a drink. “I’d buy a Pepsi Cola or Royal Crown at Ivan Hopkins’ store,” he states. Ollie Gap pond provided a site for Mitchell and his three brothers to swim in the summer.

He helped his father farm 60 acres along Duke’s Lake Road and another 20 acres by the sawmill as he put in cotton, tobacco, corn and wheat and a large vegetable garden. They raised hogs and cows, and salted the meat to store it. Mitchell remembers placing a bucket down into a well to keep milk and butter cold. He also drew water for the house in two buckets that were 36 inches in diameter.

Once he was age 5, Mitchell attended Union Level School, a nearby two-room schoolhouse near Hopkins Crossroad. “One room was a group was for grades one to four, and the next for grades five to seven. When you could read and count, then you were well-educated,” he reports.

“We had a pot bellied stove in the school house and we were assigned to bring firewood in to keep it burning,” he recalls.  School ran five months of the year, from Fall through winter, and then ceased in March so the children could work on the farms during planting time when all hands were needed.

Mitchell loved music; growing up he listened on a battery-operated radio and on a Victrola. “When the needle broke I’d turn it with my hand, and I wore several needles out and had to buy new ones at the store.”  By age 14, he was going to listen to live music in Zebulon at “Russell’s place, and Tippett’s place” he recalls. He fondly remembers playing the Nickelodeon listening to three songs for a quarter. He also went to similar clubs in Raleigh. He reports sneaking in via a window or a side door when he didn’t have the funds to pay.

When he was a teenager, his father gave him an acre of tobacco land to farm, to use the proceeds of the crop to fund his way to college.

While in high school, Mitchell left to join the Army and fight in World War II.  He was inducted at Ft. Bragg and after basic training he was in the European Theater. “I was saying – let us go, let us out” to join those fighting in the Pacific. After the war, he went back and graduated from high school, then worked four years for his father to pay for college. “I was the only kid he helped through college,” he stated. Mitchell enrolled at Atlantic Christian College (now known as Barton College) and studied natural science. On weekends he worked at Avon Privette’s gas station in Zebulon.

Mitchell met Nelle Elaine Richardson and they married in 1955. They moved to Wendell and rented an apartment, while they built their own house in 1961. Mitchell and Nelle had two sons, George Mitchell Duke Jr., who now resides in Wilmington and Bart Allen Duke, who currently lives in Raleigh.

Mitchell had a 30-year career with the Wake County Health Department, serving as Environmental Health Director. He retired when Nelle was diagnosed with cancer in 1984.

Mitchell still owned land in the Hopkins Crossroad area, and learned to fly a plane, when his brother Miller Duke bought a plane and crop dusted the fields, encouraging Mitchell to advance his flying skills. “Before this, we pulled the worms off the crops by hand,” Mitchell reports. Locals tell of seeing Miller and Mitchell flying the small plane in the neighborhood.

After Nelle passed away in July of 1990, Mitchell filled his retirement by returning to the music he had loved all his life. He put on his dancing shoes and went to Wendell’s Lion’s Club. “I was dancing five times a week,” and enjoying Big Band music.

There, Mitchell met Wanda Moore, and they were together for over 20 years until his passing.

When Mitchell’s father died, he inherited 50 acres. Years later, he bought land from his uncles, and from his brothers. He bought Duke’s Lake grocery, a store that operated for years at the crossing of Duke’s Lake and the dam at the site. It is no longer there, a victim of a storm that damaged it beyond repair.

He states that the Duke family owned 995 acres of land between that of his father and his uncles. Hopkins Chapel Baptist Church is built on the site of his uncle Clarence Duke’s land. A Victorian house near Hopkins Crossroads was torn down about 10 years ago after it was burglarized. “It was a fine house, a center hall style house, and was built for an upper middle class farmer, but after it was broken into, I had to tear it down,” Mitchell recalls.

Mitchell’s family also own another Victorian era home, which stands adjacent to the old sawmill and cotton gin. These proud production implements stopped production in the 1990s, and are owned by other family members.

Now the store is gone, and the mill house has deteriorated. Up the street a few miles away the house that Mitchell was born in, across from the cotton gin, was torn down two decades ago and replaced with a modern home. Direct and extended members of the Duke family own about 400 acres in the Hopkins area. But the mill is remarkably intact, one of a very few still remaining in the whole piedmont region, and it stands tall over acres and acres of fields and tobacco outbuildings, a proud reminder of a bygone age and a family with deep roots in the area.

Mitchell Duke passed away on December 1, 2020 and is buried in Greenmount Cemetery in Wendell.  By MaryBeth Carpenter, Copyright 2021, All rights reserved.  Excerpt from the book, “Legendary Little River Locals” which will be published soon. Info taken from interview with Mitchell Duke in March 2020. MaryBeth is Executive Director of Preservation Zebulon Inc.