In November 1635, just a year after Henrico became one of Virginia's original eight shires, Captain Thomas Harris received a 750-acre patent from the Crown. He had served under Sir Thomas Dale, and he settled at a sharp horseshoe bend of the tidal James River. The land was first called Longfield, then Curles Neck — possibly for the curves of the river, possibly for the colonist family named Curle whose descendants would include Revolutionary patriot Wilson Roscow Curle. Harris served as the Burgess for Curles Neck in the House of Burgesses at Jamestown. Archaeological excavations have uncovered the foundation of his house, dating between 1635 and 1654, along with intricate landscape terraces and traces of tunnels running down to the river — escape routes from the Powhatan attacks that haunted the early colony.

By the early 1670s Curles Neck belonged to Nathaniel Bacon — the wealthy young colonist who would launch the first armed uprising against English colonial authority in North America. Bacon and frontier colonists in places like Curles Neck wanted Royal Governor William Berkeley to launch reprisal raids against Native American settlements, including peaceful Powhatan villages, after frontier disputes. Berkeley refused; the dispute escalated into Bacon's Rebellion in 1676. Bacon's followers burned Jamestown to the ground and Berkeley retreated across the bay to the Eastern Shore. Then Bacon caught dysentery in Gloucester County and died. The rebellion collapsed. Berkeley hanged two dozen of the surviving leaders. Bacon himself was found guilty of treason posthumously; his estate, including Curles Neck, was confiscated and eventually sold to William Randolph — whose descendants would include Thomas Jefferson and Robert E. Lee.

Mid-eighteenth century Curles Neck passed through several owners. John Pleasants, a Quaker, was among them — and he did something extraordinary for his time. Quakers in Virginia had been moving toward abolition for decades, and Pleasants's will, written before his death in 1771, freed every enslaved person he held. Virginia law made such mass manumission legally fraught; courts and family members frequently tried to invalidate Quaker manumissions. Pleasants's son Robert spent years in court enforcing his father's will, eventually freeing several hundred people. John Pleasants also donated land for the first Quaker meeting house at Curles Neck and helped found the Town of Richmond. He is one of the few names in the plantation's record whose moral compass deserves to be remembered without qualification.

In 1852 a New York sugar merchant named Charles Senff bought the 3,250-acre Curles tract and added two adjoining farms to bring his holdings past 5,000 acres. The antebellum house had decayed during the Civil War; Senff built the fifteen-room Georgian Revival brick mansion that stands today. In 1913 the industrialist C.K.G. Billings — heir to a Chicago utilities fortune — purchased the property and turned it into one of America's premier thoroughbred breeding farms. By 1933, owner A. B. Ruddock had pivoted to dairy: Curles Neck Dairy began retail operations that year, and under Fred Watkins (who bought the property in 1943) it became one of the largest dairy suppliers in the eastern United States. Generations of Richmond schoolchildren toured the barns. The dairy operation closed in 1980. The land remains a working farm — privately owned, listed on the National Register of Historic Places in 2009, and not open to the public.

Curles Neck is the river bend itself — a tight horseshoe so distinctive on the map that it looks almost drawn. Two long Civil War-era oxbow farms wrap around its inside curve. The Georgian Revival mansion sits among trees on the higher ground at the neck's narrowest point, with hedgerows and pasture sweeping down to the James. The Eastern Airlines crash site is somewhere in the open fields — the markers have long since gone, but the topography is unchanged. Downstream, you can see the curving shorelines that drew tobacco planters here four centuries ago. The Powhatan villages they displaced lay along these same banks for thousands of years before that. Both histories sit beneath the cornfield.