Situated halfway between the James and York Rivers and adjacent to the Warwick River, Endview Plantation occupied a strategic spot on Virginia's Lower Peninsula. Its main house was built in the 1760s by William Harwood, the sixth generation of his family to cultivate crops on this land, as political tensions between Great Britain and the American colonies were building. During the American Revolution, Endview's occupants witnessed military activity during the 1781 Siege of Yorktown, four miles northeast. When the Civil War broke out in 1861, Dr. Humphrey Harwood Curtis owned Endview and, as captain of the Warwick Beauregards, organized local volunteers to protect life and property from advancing Union forces. By the spring of 1862, the Curtis family were among an estimated 200,000 residents of Confederate states who fled their homes because of safety concerns, relocating to the region around Danville, Virginia, for the duration of the war. Endview then became a Confederate campground and hospital and served as headquarters for Brigadier Generals Lafayette McLaws and Robert Toombs. In early May 1862, the Confederate Army withdrew from its Warwick-Yorktown line of defenses as the Union Army occupied the entire Lower Peninsula, and later that year Endview was used as a Union army camp. By 1864, Union military officials had relocated thousands of former slaves to camps in occupied Virginia, including Endview, where seven African American families were assigned to farm the land. After the war ended in 1865, displaced property owners began to return home, and the United States government returned Endview to Dr. Curtis on November 7, 1865; Curtis family descendants owned the property until 1985.
