William Emory Fisk Deal (1840-1924)

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. Deal died in September 1924. He was eighty-four years old.