William Roscow Wilson Curle (d. by 7 February 1782), member of the Convention of 1776 and judge of the Virginia Court of Appeals, was the son of Wilson Curle and Priscilla Meade Curle. He was born probably in Elizabeth City County, but the date is not known. The destruction of most of the county's records leaves much about his personal life undocumented. Curle married Euphan Wallace, who was probably the mother of his only known son. She died early in 1774, and in August or September 1776 he married a widow, Sarah Lyon. They are not known to have had any children before her death on an unrecorded date. Curle and his third wife, Mary Kello, had at least one daughter.
Curle eventually owned more than 730 acres of land in Elizabeth City County, but early in his career he practiced law in Norfolk. At the end of March 1766 he joined the Norfolk Sons of Liberty to protest the Stamp Act, and on 24 June 1772 he was elected to the borough's common council. In December 1773 Curle and several other Norfolk attorneys announced that as a consequence of the difficulty they were having collecting fees from clients, they would accept only payments in advance from all but the local merchants. Curle seems to have possessed a volatile temperament. Having once waited half an hour for a play to begin in Norfolk's theater, he threw a bottle at one of the performers and set off a riot that led to the destruction of the stage and scenery.
After moving back to Elizabeth City County in 1774, Curle was elected a member and chair of the Elizabeth City County–Hampton Town Joint Committee on 22 November of that year. The committee vigorously enforced the regulations that the Continental Congress and the Virginia Revolutionary Conventions had adopted. He took part in selecting officers for the minutemen recruited in the counties near Hampton during the autumn of 1775. Early in December of that year Curle took charge of a cache of intercepted letters from Loyalists and merchants. On one of the letters he entered a fiercely patriotic annotation, "False as hell." He branded the writers as "base, vile, secret and malicious Enemys" of American liberty and complained to the Committee of Safety in Williamsburg that "if Scotchmen continue in our Land thus free; Virginians must be Slaves."
In the aftermath of the fire that destroyed much of Norfolk on 1 January 1776, Curle lost property valued at more than £600. As an owner of a city lot, he was eligible to vote on 22 May 1776 when the few Norfolk residents who had not been burned out elected a replacement for Joseph Hutchings, who had represented the borough in the first three Revolutionary Conventions but who had been captured in a skirmish at Kemp's Landing the previous November. The voters elected Curle, who took his seat in the fifth and final Revolutionary Convention five days later. He was appointed to the Committees of Privileges and Elections and of Propositions and Grievances. Curle also served on the committee that presented drafts of the Virginia Declaration of Rights and the first constitution of the commonwealth and was almost certainly present when the convention unanimously adopted the Declaration of Rights on 12 June and the constitution on 29 June.
Curle represented Norfolk in the House of Delegates in the autumn of 1776 and sat on the Committees for Courts of Justice, of Privileges and Elections, of Propositions and Grievances, and of Religion. Reelected in the spring of 1777, he served in the session of the General Assembly that met in May of that year as a member of the Committees for Courts of Justice, of Privileges and Elections, of Propositions and Grievances, for Religion, and of Trade, an impressive list of committee assignments for a man who had never been elected to the House of Burgesses. Curle arrived late to the autumn session and was added to the committees for establishing the state's courts and to the Committee for Courts of Justice. After winning election to a third term in 1778, he again sat on the Committees for Courts of Justice, of Propositions and Grievances, and of Trade. He won a final term in the spring of 1779, served on the same committees as in the previous year, and rejoined the Committee of Privileges and Elections.
On 17 June 1779 the General Assembly elected Curle one of the three judges of the state's Court of Admiralty. Surviving records of the court do not indicate how often it met or how busy its docket was. As a member of that court Curle became ex officio a member of the Virginia Court of Appeals, and he took his seat on its first day of business, 30 August 1779. As a judge of the Court of Appeals during the formative period of the commonwealth's first appellate court, he initially shouldered light responsibilities.
Curle remained active in the defense of his region throughout the Revolutionary War, but it is not clear whether his successful petition to the governor and Council of State in November 1777 asking permission to manumit a male enslaved worker for meritorious service was in connection with the war effort. Curle was by then or soon became county lieutenant, or commander of the Elizabeth City County militia. When British officers were scouring the county in 1780 in search of supplies, one of them included Curle's name on his list of "very bad men. in other words Damned Rebels." On 7 March 1781, after a British raiding party entered the county, Curle called out and commanded the militia to repulse them, but his small force was outnumbered, and he was captured. Curle remained a prisoner of war for about a month and became gravely ill before being exchanged. The experience may have led to his death. William Roscow Wilson Curle died on an unrecorded date late in 1781 or early in 1782. The place of his burial is not known. On 7 February 1782 the governor and Council appointed a new member of the Court of Admiralty "in the room of William R. W. Curle deceased."
Sources Consulted:
Imperfectly documented family history in William and Mary Quarterly, 1st ser., 9 (1900): 126, 130; Williamsburg Virginia Gazette (Purdie and Dixon), 30 Dec. 1773; Williamsburg Virginia Gazette (Purdie), 6 Sept. 1776; Richmond Virginia Gazette (Dixon and Nicolson), 10 Mar. 1781; Norfolk and Portsmouth Herald and General Advertiser, 19 June 1839; numerous references and several letters in William J. Van Schreeven, Robert L. Scribner, and Brent Tarter, eds., Revolutionary Virginia, the Road to Independence: A Documentary Record (1973–1983), vols. 1–7 (first quotation on 4:433, second and third quotations on 5:45); appointment to court in Virginia General Assembly, House of Delegates, Journal of the House of Delegates of the Commonwealth of Virginia (1776– ), May 1779 sess., 54; Court of Appeals Order Book, 1:1, Record Group 100, LVA; Henry R. McIlwaine et al., eds., Journals of the Council of the State of Virginia, 1776–1791 (1931–1982), 2:28; Cornwallis Papers, Public Record Office, London, CO 30/11/3, no. 12, fol. 18 (fourth quotation); Julian P. Boyd et al., eds., The Papers of Thomas Jefferson (1950– ), 5:95–96, 293–294, 324, 330–331 (printing a Curle letter in New-York Historical Society, New York, N.Y.), 352, 365, 366–367, 383–385, 428; fragmentary estate accounts in Elizabeth City Co. Order Book (1784–1788), 59, 283, 373, 548; death without date reported in Journals of Council of State, 3:41 (final quotation).