Thomas Harwood arrived in the area from England in 1622 or 1623, and by 1635 he had acquired land that included the present-day site of Endview. The property passed through five generations of the Harwood family until William Harwood built Endview there in 1769, and later generations owned and farmed the land for the next 90 years. In 1858, Dr. Humphrey Harwood Curtis, a great-grandson of William Harwood, acquired the property. Records indicate that by 1861 Dr. Curtis and his wife Maria lived on 910 acres with 77 head of livestock, three horses, and four mules, and according to the 1860 census, 12 enslaved Africans were also living there at that time. Dr. and Mrs. Curtis had 11 children, eight of whom survived into adulthood. Dr. Curtis died in 1881, and Mrs. Curtis continued to manage the farm with assistance from her eldest son Simon until her death in 1919. Before the Harwood family settled the property, Native Americans had for thousands of years hunted and gathered plants and other materials on the land for subsistence. Once farming began in the 17th century, agriculture changed the landscape dramatically. By 1769, the property included the house as well as a variety of outbuildings and landscape features, and documented 19th-century structures included a kitchen, a privy, a barn, slave quarters, and eventually Dr. Curtis's medical office. Like other farms and plantations of the era, Endview had to be self-sufficient, with its inhabitants growing almost everything they needed, and farming on the land continued well into the 20th century.
