INFORMAL HISTORY

 

By Mary Y. Moore

 

 

How come?

 

  Honolulu, H.I.

January 31st, 1946

 

Dearest Will,

 

You asked for it and here it is, such as it is. I had

nothing to go on but my own memories but I hope it may give Atwell

and Margot some little knowledge of the roots from which they grew.

If they don't care for it now just fold it away in the big Moore

book and some day someone will want to know a bit about the Moore's

background. My handwriting is so execrable I should like to have

had it typewritten but there are no public stenographers available

now. I used to find one in the hotel here when I was State Historian

of the D.A.R.

 

I'm sending you a book that Edith gave me long ago. It

is such a good presentation of the early settlement of Ohio in

which our ancestors had a part. It seems to me that all these things

should go together and I don't know any better and more sympathetic

custodian than yourself. The steamboat book was sent me by Cousin

Louie Ricker. I think it is just compilations from newspaper columns

It has only one mention of our dear father, but the picture of the

grand old Bonanza on the back, certainly speaks for him, too.

 

Much love, as always

 

                                          Mary

 

History

The history of our branch of the Moore Family in the United

States of America begins with the Reverend John Moore, who was preaching

the Everlasting Gospel in the town of Newton, Long Island in the year

1641. The history of Moore Family in Ohio begins when two of the

Reverend John's descendants, after the Revolution, in which our Phillip

had fought in Captain Tucker's Company pioneered out to the Ohio country,

the great western frontier. They came by stages, apparently searching

for a good place to settle down. We hear of them at Hagerstown Md.,

and at Black Eddy on the Delaware River, some twenty miles below Easton,

Pa.

The western star still beckoned and so they came, presumably

by wagon over the Allegheny Mountains and by raft down the Ohio River till,

at the junction of this river with the Scioto, they found the ideal spot,

--- a village called Alexandria, now part of the spreading Portsmouth

(50,000 population). Their arrival here was about 1797. They were appar-

ently joined by their families and Phillip built a stone house which still

stands and is known as the First Methodist Meeting Place in the State of

Ohio.

 

In the meanwhile another pioneer family, the Samuel Gunns

from Woodbury Conn., came to establish themselves at the same desirable

site. They were of Scotch descent -- the Gunn Clan --and thoroughly

British, Samuel gave the ground for the first Episcopal Church and acted

as lay reader. One day, as my grandmother, Amanda Gunn Moore, told me,

young, good-looking Levi Moore, a son of Phillip of the stone house, came

by on horseback and, stopping at their place, asked for a drink of water.

She was happy to accommodate him and it seems to have been a case of love

at first sight, for not long afterwards they were married. She bore him

ten children, presumably in the small log house which I remember as the

birthplace of our father, Enos Bascomb Moore.

 

Of grandfather Moore's ten children, three died in early

infancy one daughter, Lora, passed away at sixteen and her sister, Mary

Ellen, at twenty-five Maria became the second wife of Solomon McCall and 

their home at Buena Vista on the Ohio River, some seventeen miles below

Portsmouth, was the Shangri-La of young nieces and nephews for any years

She had no children.

 

Grandma said she put on a cap when her first baby, William,

was born (October 8th, 18115 and she wore one for the rest of her life.

(She died in 1888,) When she joined the Methodist Church, as in duty bound, 

following her husband, she left off all her jewelry. Her sons were mostly

named for bishops, but with our father, Enos, a mishap quite harrowing to

grandma, occurred. She had planned to call him Henry Bascomb after an

honored bishop, but when at the altar the parson asked the child's name,

grandfather responded Enos Bascomb and what could she do.

 

Dear old Grandma Moore made her home with us in Portsmouth

all through my childhood. She lived to be ninety-five, as did her mother

and grandmother before her. I loved to go up to her room and hear her tell

of the early days -- the little sister who fell from the wagon as they were

crossing the mountains and had to be left in a tiny roadside grave; the

pioneer's life when matches were unknown and one kept a perpetual fire

going (if it went out, one sent a kettle to a neighbor's for live coals) and

the spinning and weaving of cloth for clothes and blankets. Her mother, who

had been Joanna Warner, had brought out a long felt circular coat, scarlet

in color with an ermine collar, and she wore gold beads, Her grandchildren

used the cloak for tableaus and charades many times.

 

It was not long before Levi and Amanda Moore became possessors

of a good sized farm and frame story-and-a-half house on the bank of the

beautiful Ohio River about seven miles below Portsmouth Whether acquired

by inheritance o r hard work, I know not, but I think it must have been the

former. I was told by one of the daughters-in-law that Grandfather Moore

was the type who liked to sit on the fence and watch other men work. At

any rate, no one of the four sons, William, Milton, Enos, or Samuel, had any

desire for the life of a farmer, but all were intrigued by the riverman's

way of living.

 

An occasional flat boat loaded with freight for New Orleans

anchored briefly at their very door. It was the Great Steamboat Era and

one of the Moore boys succumbed to the spell -- William was said to have

abandoned his plow in the field to board a boat. Enos, who had graduated

from the country school, was planning to study law at Delaware College

(Ohio Wesleyan University), when a chance flat boat loaded with flour and

New Orleans bound, lured him aboard; the other two brothers followed and

soon all four were careering on the Mississippi.

 

It was not long until Milton, with his wife and young baby,

succumbed in one of those Yellow Fever epidemics that used to ravish the

South, We children only knew Uncle Milton's family through the lot in

Greenlawn Cemetery where their ashes lie.

 

Just before the outbreak of the Civil War, William and Enos

had built their own boat -- the Steamer Hope. They had fitted it out

luxuriously with china service ordered from Paris and the staterooms adorned

with oval mirrors set in carved gold frames. I think their proud steamer

never made a trip for in war's extremity they were obliged to scuttle it

to save capture by the rebels. Some of the old china, marked "Str. Hope",

and the oval’ mirrors are still in family possession.

 

William's family had a permanent home in Yazoo City, Missis-

sippi, and owned one slave., He was shrewd enough to turn his Confederate.

money into diamond set jewelry before hasty departure for the North.

 

After the Civil War, William and Enos established a foundry

and machine works at Portsmouth (The Portsmouth Foundry & Machine Works),

which William managed. Enos and Samuel continued as steamboat men --

Captain and Pilot, respectively, on the Ohio River. They were not the

gambling roistering type that the literature of the day depicts, but were

men of high morals and culture. William was bookish and owned one of the

finest libraries in the State, where he practically lived out of business

hours.  Samuel had artistic tastes and collected steel and wood engravings,

carving wood as a hobby when low water or ice in the Ohio laid up his boat.

 

 

Samuel and William had both married pretty girls whom they

had known at home in their early youth.  Enos married, first, Maria Pratt

from New York State, whom he found teaching in Yazoo City. Her early

death left him with two small daughters, Frances and Mary (myself). After

eight years he married Mary Ellen Switzer, a very modish and vivacious

young woman who had come to Portsmouth from Dayton, Ohio to teach in the

public schools. Their children were -- Enos, who lived one day only,

Ralph, Lucy, Edith, and Will. Ralph married Carol Simmons or Portsmouth 

and has passed from his long career, in El Paso, Texas; Lucy is married

to Dr. John W. Carpenter, a Presbyterian minister, late of Harrodsburg, 

Kentucky, and now at Dunbar, West Virginia; Edith married Will Love of

Honolulu and long made a home there, but is now widowed. She has a home

in Carmel-by-the-Sea, California. Will married Jessie Atwell of Sewickley,

Pa., and is Assistant to the President of the Gulf Oil Corporation in

Pittsburgh, with a home at Sewickley, Pennsylvania. Of the two older

sisters, Frances, widow of C. A . Geiger, makes her home in Troy, Ohio,

and is the mother of five children living in Troy, Dayton, and Palm Beach,

Florida. Mary has, for eighteen years, lived at the Alexander Young Hotel

in Honolulu.

 

The Moore brothers were never localized men and would have

scorned membership in Rotary or Kiwanis. Owing, probably to steamboat

careers, they were at home in Cincinnati, in New Orleans or St. Louis.

They subscribed for the big city newspapers ---The New York Tribune Boston 

Transcript, and Philadelphia Ledger. At a time when mid-westerners

rarely crossed the sea, William with his wife and older children and Enos

with his wife, made extensive European trips. Due, probably to ancestral

inheritance, they were religious church-going people rather than smart

folk. William's grandson, Captain John Warner Moore, has been a Chaplain

in the Navy through the two World Wars. Our young men have nearly all had

college educations and almost unanimously have chosen engineering courses.

Samuel's son, Arthur was a distinguished physician in his home town,

Portsmouth.  He had studied in Vienna. A vein of poetry runs through the

tribe. Among the Reverend John's descendants was Clement Moore, who wrote

the perennial classic, The Night Before Christmas"; Marianne the sister

of Chaplain Moore, is a writer of ultra modern verse and has had many

encomiums, --- The New Yorker calling her the most eminent American poet

of the day. Frances Geiger has also been writing some lovely things down

through the years.  A younger Marianna, Samuel's granddaughter, has pub-

lished some beautiful vagrant verse.

 

The early generations of Moores were peaceful men. Not one

of them would have killed a fly unnecessarily; nevertheless, at least

seven of the present tribe have served with distinction in the late war.

In religious denominations, we have Episcopalians, Presbyterians, Methodists, 

Christian Scientists, all represented. By marriage we have the son of an 

orthodox Rabbi and Jack Moore, Ralph's son, married into the Swedenborg Church 

God help us all! (despite our theologies!)