When James B. Duke purchased the land that would become West Campus, there was one plot not for sale. Nestled within Duke’s nearly 200-acre acquisition was a brick-enclosed, one-quarter-acre burial site that served as the final resting place of the Rigsbee family, one of Durham’s most prosperous in the 19th century.
Rigsbee family legend states that James B. Duke once sat along the graveyard’s low wall and described his vision for a university to Thomas J. Rigsbee Jr., who became the last person buried at the site in 1924. The family was originally a neighbor of Duke’s father, Washington Duke, and eventually sold much of its land to other well-known Durham figures, including William Erwin, who operated a prominent cotton mill.
One year after Rigsbee Jr.’s death, James B. Duke’s 1925 agreement, which transferred the land from Rigsbee to Duke, specified that any Rigsbee descendants would retain rights of “ingress, egress and regress” to the cemetery, as would be necessary for maintenance and upkeep…