Deal, William Emory Fisk

Life Span
to
Dickinson Connection
Class of 1859
    Full name
    William Emory Deal
    Place of Birth
    Birth Date Certainty
    Exact
    Death Date Certainty
    Estimated
    Gender
    Male
    Race
    White
    Sectional choice
    North
    Origins
    Slave State
    No. of Spouses
    1
    No. of Children
    4
    Family
    William Grove Deal (father), Janetta Suttan (mother), Roberta Griffith (wife, 1875)
    Education
    Dickinson (Carlisle College)
    Occupation
    Attorney or Judge
    Educator
    Government
    Other state government

    William Emory Fisk Deal (Dickinson Chronicles)

    Scholarship
    William Emory Fisk Deal was born on March 8, 1840 in Calvert County, Maryland to William Grove and Janetta Suttan Deal. He prepared for his undergraduate years at the West River Classical School and entered Dickinson College in Carlisle, Pennsylvania in 1855 with the class of 1859. He was a member of the Phi Kappa Sigma fraternity and was elected as a member of the Belles Lettres Society.

    Following graduation in the early summer of 1859, Deal traveled to California where he taught until 1863. He then studied law and embarked on a lucrative career in Virginia City, Nevada. He qualified to argue before the state supreme court in 1865. Deal was a wealthy man by October 1875, when he lost his expensive new home in an exclusive part of town in the great Virginia City Fire. He was a presidential elector in the 1880 election, state commissioner for the care of the insane from 1881 to 1885, and a regent of the University of Nevada between 1884 and 1903. Deal argued a case before the United States Supreme Court with his old Dickinson fraternity brother Horatio Collins King in 1894. After 1903, Deal moved to San Francisco where, in 1905 and 1906, he argued before the California Supreme Court on behalf of the Ophir Silver Mining Company of Virginia City.

    In May 1875, Deal married Roberta Griffith of Ann Arundel County, Maryland. The couple had three daughters and a son. W. E. F. Fisk died in September 1924. He was eighty-four years old.
    John Osborne and James W. Gerencser, eds., “ William Emory Fisk Deal,” Dickinson Chronicles, http://chronicles.dickinson.edu/encyclo/d/ed_dealWEF.htm.
    How to Cite This Page: "Deal, William Emory Fisk," House Divided: The Civil War Research Engine at Dickinson College, https://hd.housedivided.dickinson.edu/node/5551.