Millard Fuller, 74, Habitat cofounder

Millard Fuller, 74, the millionaire entrepreneur who gave it all away to help found the Christian house-building charity Habitat for Humanity, died yesterday.

He died after being taken to the emergency room at Sumter Regional Hospital near his south Georgia home in Americus, his wife, Linda, said. An autopsy was planned.

The couple were planning to celebrate their 50th wedding anniversary in August with a 100-house worldwide "blitz build." Those plans will likely go forward without him.

"Millard would not want people to mourn his death," Linda Fuller said. "He would be more interested in having people put on a tool belt and build a house for people in need."

From its beginning in 1976, Habitat grew to a worldwide network that has provided shelter to more than 1.5 million people. Habitat home buyers are required to work on their own houses.

Mr. Fuller built an army of volunteers that included former U.S. presidents - including Jimmy Carter - other world leaders and Hollywood celebrities.

The son of a widower farmer in the cotton-mill town of Lanett, Ala., Mr. Fuller earned his first profit at age 6, selling a pig. While studying law at the University of Alabama, he formed a direct-marketing company with a friend selling cookbooks and candy to high school chapters of the Future Homemakers of America. That business made them millionaires.

When Mr. Fuller's capitalist drive threatened to kill his marriage, the couple sold everything to devote themselves to the Christian values they grew up with.

The couple's search for a mission led them to Koinonia, an interracial farming collective outside Americus. There, with Koinonia founder Clarence Jordan, the Fullers developed the concept of building no-interest housing for the poor - an idea that eventually grew into Habitat for Humanity.

Mr. Fuller's works won him numerous accolades, including a 1996 Presidential Medal of Freedom, the nation's highest civilian honor.

For nearly three decades, he was the public face of Habitat, traveling the world to hammer nails and press bricks from local clay alongside some of the globe's poorest.