Qualla: Curles Neck Plantation

Curles Neck Plantation: Introduction

Sun, 31 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

On July 19, 1951, an Eastern Airlines Lockheed Constellation, Flight 601 to Miami, was beating itself apart in a Virginia thunderstorm. A hydraulic access door had popped open in flight, causing such violent buffeting that the crew thought the plane would disintegrate before they could reach Richmond. The captain, looking for the largest field he could find, recognized Curles Neck Farm. He landed wheels-up in a cornfield, skidded eleven hundred feet through two fences, and stopped in a pasture. Every passenger survived. The Constellation was barged down the James, repaired, and put back in service. That story is a single afternoon in the four-century life of Curles Neck — a plantation older than the United States, still a working farm, still owned by a single family.

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Curles Neck Plantation: Captain Harris's Tobacco

Sun, 31 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

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 ...

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Curles Neck Plantation: Nathaniel Bacon's Last Stand

Sun, 31 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

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...

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Curles Neck Plantation: John Pleasants Frees His People

Sun, 31 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

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, ...

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Curles Neck Plantation: Dairy Cattle and Horse Racing

Sun, 31 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

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 s...

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Curles Neck Plantation: What You See From Above

Sun, 31 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

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 h...

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