Wayne County, NC - Newspaper Resources Reprinted by permission of The News & Observer of Raleigh, North Carolina. Cannot be reproduced without permission. Claude Moore Brings The Past To The Present The News & Observer People Saturday, July 21, 1984 By Steven Litt Staff Writer TURKEY - Claude Moore looks back on the history of Sampson County with a pride of ownership. For more than 200 years, Moores have cultivated Sampson's soil, fought in the nation's wars & preserved its past. The latter task has fallen mainly to Claude Moore, 68, the historian of Sampson County. He maintains an informal history museum at the end of a dirt road on his property in the farm country outside the community of Turkey, population 200. The museum consists of a 1770 cabin & a separate building that formed the dining room & kitchen from a nearby plantation. Both buildings were moved to the property. A covered picnic area with a concrete floor completes the museum. Moore is ready to receive visitors & school groups by appointment & can accommodate up to 100 people at the museum & picnic area. Crammed with memorabilia, the buildings bring history closer. There are letters documenting slave transactions, Confederate currency & war bonds, weapons from two centuries & 127 volumes of records from the Civil War, printed in 1893. Confederate officers & generals stare down from sepia-tinted photos. A dour Gen Robert E. Lee gazes out from a Matthew Brady photograph, taken in 1866 when Lee was in Washington to ask for a pardon. Moore's ancestors sit stiffly in old pastels & oil paintings, drawn & painted by itinerant portraitists. The objects fascinate. They exude the subtle aroma of time. But a visit to the museum is not complete without a chat with Moore. His voice, mellowed by age & study, lingers over tales of 17th & 18th century ancestors who left England for Barbados & then South Carolina before moving north to fight in North Carolina's Tuscarora Indian Wars. His speech quickens as he touches on favorite relatives or relates a ghost story. It all delights him. "I don't have to ask for things," he said, discussing his collection. "I just tell people I would receive, you know... If I see something I want, I just wait & in time, I'll get it. And if I don't, that's all right. Other things will come, too." A stocky, wavy-haired man whose eyes crinkle when he smiles, Moore displays an encyclopedic knowledge of his collection, which includes hundreds of objects, the detritus & treasures of history. None of it is cataloged. The information lies in Moore's head. Moore, a retired educator, was principal at four Sampson County high schools & one in Halifax County. His secondary school career spanned 21 years. He also taught history for 15 years at Mount Olive College in Wayne County. Today, he contents himself with writing articles, teaching an occasional course at Mount Olive, spending time with groups for the elderly & renting out his 200 acres of farmland. He lives with his wife, Norma & an elderly cousin. His three children & other relatives are frequent visitors. In May, a family reunion drew 250 people from 12 Southern states. During a recent afternoon, Moore walked around his property & showed off his 19th century house, located across a broad lawn from the museum. Nearby were several small farm buildings, erected in the 1860s & '70s, a two-acre fish pond teeming with bass, brim & catfish & a shed filled with peafowl, whose iridescent feathers were furled in the shadows. Horses lazily munched grass in a nearby paddock, along with a knock-kneed colt (knot-kneed). Dark clouds blew overhead & thunder signaled an approaching storm, but Moore didn't seem to mind. He was carried away by meditations on his collection. Walking over to the museum, Moore said the building was built in 1770. "This boy came from England, cut the boards for the house with a ripsaw & dovetailed the corners," he said. "As his family grew, he built other cabins for the boys to live in. It had a corn crib, stables, a kitchen off from the house. About the time of Hurricane Hazel, the top blew off." Moore bought the building from the owner, who lived 12 miles away & moved it to his property. He rebuilt the top floor & filled the structure with the objects in his collection. Across the yard sit the kitchen & dining room from a plantation four miles away. Moore bought that building as well & paid to move it to his property. He said he & relatives have financed the moving & refurbishing of the museum buildings. To one side of the 1770 building sits a large iron cauldron that had been used to cook food for slaves. On plantations, cooks threw meat & vegetables in the bottom of the pot, cooked them & carried the food out to the fields "to feed the help," Moore said. "That saved time." Other objects in the older building recall the slave era. A contract of sale, hung on the wall, explains that a 4-year-old boy was sold for $250 by James Thomson to his son, Curtis, in 1818. Throughout the building are small baskets woven by slaves to hold small household items. Moving through the attic of the museum, Moore picked up a slave's grave marker, a simple slat of heart pine, carved with a circular shape on top like the silhouette of a human head. "It was said to be an image of the holy ghost," Moore said. A small arsenal of weapons lies scattered throughout the 1770 house. One is a musket made at Harper's Ferry in 1822. Some objects are worn by time, but the swords & pistols still have a well-balanced heft. Hopping into his air-conditioned car, Moore steered between fields of corn to his family's graveyard. It was a small, peaceful plot, spotted with grave markers & shaded by tall pines. "These are all our kin people here," he said. Moore leaned against a memorial to Col. James Moore, an ancestor who fought in the American Revolution. James Moore's sons moved to Alabama & Tennessee, beginning a process of dispersion that spread the family name throughout the South. One relative, Thomas Overton Moore, became governor of Louisiana during the Civil War. Later, as he drove down nearby country roads past the houses of other Moores who live in the area, including his own children, Moore again started telling stories. A familiar bridge triggered a story about a bride who died there on her wedding day: "All during the years around here, people say they have seen this woman in white on the bridge down there & it used to frighten horses so that they would have to put a blanket over their heads, or a sack & they still wouldn't go across. They would have to go way around 14 miles to go to Clinton (the county seat.) Even the Yankee cavalry were getting ready to cross & the horses were so frightened they thought the Confederates had a trap for them. But still, the horses wouldn't go across. The last time anybody saw anything down there was in 1927 when the bridge washed out & there was a great light coming from the swamp." A raconteur & a love of the past, Moore enjoys sharing his knowledge & his collection with visitors. He means to get it all cataloged someday & to gather funds to perpetuate the museum. In the meantime, he lives the life of a latter-day country squire, surrounded by the aura of history - a history that comes alive in his stories & descriptions. He may have retired from full-time teaching, but his lessons continue at his museum. ============================================================== USGENWEB NOTICE: In keeping with our policy of providing free information on the Internet, data may be used by non-commercial entities, as long as this message remains on all copied material. The electronic pages may NOT be reproduced in any format for profit or for presentation by other persons or organizations. Persons or organizations desiring to use this material for purposes other than stated above must obtain the written consent of the file contributor, and contact the listed USGenWeb archivist with proof of this consent. The submitter has given permission to the USGenWeb Archives to store the file permanently for free access. 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