Harmanus Barkulo Duryea was born on December 13, 1863 in Brooklyn, New York, United States. He was the son of Harmanus Barkulo and Mary (Peters) Durvca. His father was a lawyer, corporation counsel of Brooklyn, member of the Board of Education, Republican assemblyman from Kings County, and major-general in the New York National Guard.
As a young man Duryea was interested chiefly in yachting; in later years he devoted almost his entire time to the breeding and management of race horses. In both fields he achieved genuine distinction due not merely to his money but to his personal qualities. In his youth, during summers spent on the family estate near Red Bank, New Jearsey, he acquired the rudiments of his yachtsmanship in races on the Shrewsbury River. With W. Butler Duncan he originated one-design boat races in the United States, using twenty-one footers built by the Herreshoffs. He also raced several forty-foot yachts.
In 1891 he was elected to the New York Yacht Club. For two seasons (1895 - 96) he sailed a “two and a half rater” at Cowes in some fifty races each season and made the best record for those seasons in his class. For a number of seasons he also had the best record at Newport, Rhode Island. He and Harry Payne Whitney built the seventy-foot sloop Yankee, which won many races with Duryea as her pilot.
In 1895 the Earl of Dunraven selected Duryea to represent him in the America’s Cup races of that year. As an amateur pilot he was highly esteemed. During these years he usually passed the winters in shooting on his estate at Hickory Valley, Tennessee. He was a president of the United States Field Trial Club and for several years was the leading winner in field trials. Much of his work with horses was done in partnership with Harry Payne Whitney, who for some time after the death of his father, William C. Whitney, ran his horses under the Duryea colors.
Duryea and Harry Payne Whitney owned Irish Lad, who won the Brooklyn Handicap in 1903 and the Metropolitan Handicap a year later. When Gov. Charles Evans Hughes of New York secured the enactment of his anti-betting measures, Duryea, seeing no future for racing in the United States, in 1910 took his horses to France. He maintained a breeding farm in Normandy and a racing stable at Chantilly.
in April 1895, in St. George’s Chapel, London Duryea married Ellen Winchester, widow of William Weld of Boston, who survived him.
