Carolina enters the family history not as a settled home but as a distant source of valuable pine. The Duke enterprise establishes a pitch plantation there, tying the forests of the southern colonies to a wider business in timber and naval stores. Its commercial promise is inseparable from the use of enslaved people, and the plantation’s eventual sale marks a change in the company’s direction.

A Southern Resource for the Duke Business

The family’s interest in Carolina grows out of a practical effort to broaden its timber operations. At a discussion of new opportunities, Bernard proposes that Duke & Sons move into pitch and tar. The company already has pitch pine, he says, but the superior trees grow in the Carolinas; he therefore recommends buying and operating a pitch-pine plantation there. His father accepts the proposal, making Carolina part of a business strategy that reaches beyond cutting and selling lumber.

The plantation also offers a way to connect forest resources with shipbuilding and maritime demand. Jan argues that the arrival of English and Scottish shipwrights along the New England coast makes entry into shipbuilding worthwhile, since building vessels closer to the timber supply would reduce the need to transport lumber, masts, bowsprits, and yards to European or English ports. Bernard’s pitch-and-tar proposal belongs to this same outward-looking expansion: the Duke family seeks not only to sell forest products but to supply the materials and infrastructure required by shipping.

Plantation Labor and Production

The Carolina operation rests on enslaved labor. When Bernard later describes the plantation to Joab Hitchbone, he distinguishes the northern logging enterprises from the southern business and identifies his nephew Piet as responsible for Carolina. Piet, Bernard says, works two hundred enslaved people, and the plantation produces pitch and tar of the highest quality. The account presents the scale and product quality as business achievements while also making clear the coercive labor system on which that output depends.

The enterprise is maintained despite restrictive English laws. Bernard’s remark that the family has done well notwithstanding those laws situates the plantation within a wider contest over colonial trade and regulation. Carolina is thus not an isolated venture: its production contributes to the family’s commercial reach even as the company’s managers negotiate the legal and political conditions governing trade.

Piet Duke’s Responsibility

Piet’s management role becomes explicit when the family prepares for an overseas voyage in 1758. Nicolaus tells him he cannot join the proposed European tour because he is responsible for the pitch plantation. Nicolaus considers arranging for Henk Steen to oversee it in Piet’s absence, but Steen refuses, citing moral scruples about slavery. Nicolaus responds that he intends to replace Steen with someone more hard-headed. The exchange shows that plantation oversight is treated as an essential responsibility, while opposition to slavery is treated by the company president as an obstacle to be removed.

The episode also places Piet’s duties within the family’s internal division of labor. Other relatives are free to travel or pursue separate plans, but Piet is expected to remain accountable for the Carolina property. His assignment makes him the family member directly associated with the plantation’s management, and the failed attempt to find a substitute emphasizes how firmly the business depends on its appointed overseer.

Sale and Changing Priorities

In later years, Piet Duke recalls the company’s retreat from expansion under Jan and Nicolaus’s controlling leadership. The Carolina plantation is sold, while Piet is assigned to handle New England logging jobbers and Jan manages the remaining Québec forestlands. Nicolaus remains president at the Boston headquarters. The sale is part of a broader period in which the older leaders permit little innovation and close portions of the business rather than develop new ventures.

Carolina’s place in the family’s history therefore has a defined arc: it begins as a strategic source of superior pitch pine and becomes an operating plantation producing high-quality pitch and tar through enslaved labor; it then disappears from the company’s portfolio as the business contracts and responsibilities are redistributed. Its story exposes the material and human costs beneath the family’s commercial expansion, while its eventual sale records how shifts in leadership can redirect a company’s relationship to the lands and labor on which it has depended.