Mineral Memories

The Moore Farm, 3 Miles South of Mineral, 1910

Submitted by Roger Moore

"Making Hay" at the Moore Farm - Early 1900s

Courtesy of Roger Moore

The following information was provided by Roger Moore, a 1955 graduate of Mineral High School.

Moore Family History

"I have researched the Moore family history back to 1750 in this country and am stuck at that date. I am unable to find out exactly when they came to America. Eli Moore, my Great Great Grandfather, settled in Putnam Co. (now Bureau Co. ) in the spring of 1833. He built his cabin on the far west edge of what now is the town of Sheffield, ( which is now the East Edge of Mineral Twp. ) Eli Moore was the First known White Settler in Mineral Township. History says, John Green Reed came in 1834 and settled next to the Moore claim. Eli later bought 80 acres of land in 1836 for $1.25 per acre, from the Govt. where Sheffield now sits. He discovered coal in the banks of coal creek and helped John Green Reed who as far as I can tell, may have been his nephew, deliver to Princeton the first load of coal.

In the late 1840's Eli and his brother Caleb moved their families to a farm 3 miles south of Mineral on the North edge of Barren Grove, and In 1853 Eli & his brother Caleb bought the farm.

Eli Moore

Courtesy of Roger Moore

Eli ( born in 1803 Died in 1874 ) is buried in the Mineral Cemetery beside his last wife, in the far southwest corner on top of the hill. Eli had three wives. The first wife was Huldah Rice, whom he married in 1823. She died a few years after they left Trumbull Co. Ohio and headed west. There were children but the names are unknown.

The second wife, Barbara Bramlet, married Eli in Parke Co., Indiana in 1832, and came with him to Putnam County (now Bureau Co.) in the spring of 1833. She bore him a daughter but left her family in the spring of 1834, just two years after they were married. She did not take the baby Matilda with her. Barbara did not like living in a cabin in the timber with Indians all around her.

The third wife, Ann Timberman, married Eli in 1850, and gave Eli another daughter and 4 sons and she died many years after Eli in 1897.

The 24 Moore grandchildren who came from Eli's 4 son's and his brothers son's, attended Mineral schools (some, in the old wooden Mineral school and most, in the small township one room school). My father Kenneth, was one of the last few families with the Moore name to leave Mineral Twp in 1955. The strip mine took my grandfather's (and the rest of the Moore owned land) for coal. There are some families left who are descendants of Eli Moore, such as Flint, Carlson, Miller, Pierson, Norton, but the Moore name is very scarce in the Mineral area.

William Moore

Courtesy of Roger Moore

Eli's son, WIlliam Moore, gave this written 1842 history of his father, Eli, to the newspaper about a half-breed Indian called "Girty":

Eli was often referred to in Bureau County history as the lone traveler who came upon the remains of old "Black Girty", the half-breed outlaw who's name was Mike Girty. Girty's gang of outlaws terrorized and murdered early settlers. Girty had been released from prison near Prairie du Chien, in the last stages of consumption ( T. B. ). He had come back to the old hunting grounds and Indian village at Tiskilwa but found that all of the Indians had moved west of the Mississippi.

The half-breed, on foot, hit the trail of the Sauk and Fox, which passed into Mineral Township just west of Sheffield and on out to Barren Grove. Here wolves attacked him and were eating the carcass when Eli Moore rode up on horseback. Stopping to see what they were devouring he found a medal and other trinkets from which he identified the remains of the outlaw.

(End of newspaper article.)

I have been working on my Moore history since 1980. I have researched Eli Moore's Grandfather, who was Nathaniel Moore from Chester County Pennsylvania. He had 5 sons. His partly stone home built in 1727 is in Goshen Twp. and still occupied. Nathaniel's son Emmor was Eli's father. Emmor had 2 daughters and 10 sons. Eli was next to the youngest of his children. Emmor lived the last few years of his life in Trumbull County Ohio, where he is buried in the Bristolville Pioneer cemetery.

I have put together over 90 family history books, with 186 pages.

Since all of my ancestors were farmers I have compiled something I call My American Pioneer Farmer.

AMERICAN PIONEER FARMER

In the immensity of the beginnings, everything was overpoweringly big, the open spaces terrifying, the silences deafening, and the winds oppressive. How did it feel to sliver away virgin sod and your life as well - furrow by furrow, day by day.

He was a natural born pioneer. You can hear him shouting with exuberance about a farm he could call his own. There is seemingly no limit to his endurance, ambition and resolve. Early and late he breaks the prairie, herds his animals, saws and hammers about a great barn, toils in his fields.

And here are the great rows of towering ash, protecting the farmstead like unyielding bodyguards. Only God in his blue heaven knows what pioneer in utter faith stuck those rooted sticks in the ground and watered and prayed and watered and prayed - all for the next generation. Everywhere are the shadows and echoes of the past.

Somewhere today there are children playing in the long and dusty farm yards. They will some day marry and beget children, and those children will beget yet another generation. We will no longer be third generation English Americans or fourth generation Irish Americans or second generation German Americans, for the bloods in our veins will be so homogenized, we will be simply Americans, and that alone, The offspring of immigrant pioneers who toiled and suffered and died that their children might inherit the promise. And then, the story of men like them, drawing their life from the soil and nurturing their families on it, like the emigrant epic today, will become fuzzy and lost in the mists of time. We forget the stories and songs of our fathers and fatherlands, and we lose the sense of that struggle in this comfortable transient society.

We are the custodian of a dream and the inheritor of its promise. In the larger and truer sense, we are all keepers of the story, for the blood that flows in our veins belongs to immigrant forebears who sacrificed mightily to make a new life, in a brave new world. A German, immigrant once wrote:

For the first [Generation], Death
For the second, Need.
For the third, Bread.

Now, before dusk, I walk my fields, as my people have done, ages ago, and ponder the fine and delicate balance between rootbound and rootless. In the immutable cycle of the seasons, the days shorten. Cornstalks rattle in the breeze, dancing in the silhouettes. Under a vermilion sky, crows congregate in a far off, scraggly box elder. Their cries, like the distant, muffled sounds of the past itself, are lost to the wind. The prairie gathers itself for the evening once again and in the autumn of my discontent, I hear Eli's hammer, and think of him.