Endview Plantation: A Doctor's Farm Between Two Armies

The plantation house at Endview was built in seventeen sixty-nine by William Harwood along the Great Warwick Road, the colonial highway connecting Williamsburg to Hampton. It is a plain, sturdy Georgian structure, the kind of house built by a working planter rather than a grandee, and its plainness is part of what makes its Civil War story so compelling.

By eighteen fifty-eight the property belonged to Dr. Humphrey Harwood Curtis, a physician and great-grandson of the original builder. Curtis was one of only two doctors in all of Warwick County, and when the war came to the Virginia Peninsula in the spring of eighteen sixty-two, that medical fact placed him directly in the middle of it.

In April of eighteen sixty-two, General George McClellan landed the Army of the Potomac at Fort Monroe and began his slow push toward Richmond along the Peninsula. The Confederate Army established the Warwick-Yorktown defensive line, a chain of earthworks running across the Peninsula, and held it for a month. Endview sat near enough to the fighting that Confederate commanders, including Generals Lafayette McLaws and Robert Toombs, used the house as a headquarters. Dr. Curtis himself tended Confederate wounded in its rooms.

As the war reached the Peninsula, the Curtis family left the house for the Danville area. Federal forces moved in and held Endview through the rest of the war. By early eighteen sixty-four, the federal government had taken control of the property and settled African-American families there.

After the war the property was returned to Dr. Curtis, and his descendants owned it until nineteen eighty-five. Newport News acquired it in nineteen ninety-five. Today Endview operates as a living history museum, its four rooms dressed with period medical supplies and soldier gear, a compact record of the war that passed through its doorways from both directions.