CONFEDERATE BIOGRAPHY:  MOLLIE E. MOORE DAVIS, Smith County, TX

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Copyright.  All rights reserved.
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Submitted by Mary Love Berryman - marylove@tyler.net
14 April 2002 
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TEXANS WHO WORE THE GRAY by Sid S. Johnson 

MOLLIE E. MOORE DAVIS.

Mrs. Mollie E. Moore Davis, of New Orleans, the gifted Southern 
novelist and poet, was born in Alabama, and was reared and educated 
in Texas.  Her father was Dr. John Moore, a physician of note and a 
cultivated gentleman of the old school. Her mother was originally 
Miss Marion Crutchfield, of Virginia, from whom she inherited a 
taste for poetry. Dr. and Mrs. Moore removed to Texas in 1858 and 
settled near Tyler at the beautiful country seat, "Sylvan Dell,"
which the daughter has immortalized in her writings. Here at the age 
of nine years she began to write verse, her earliest efforts being 
published in the old Tyler Reporter, and in the Houston Telegraph, 
founded by Gail Borden.  She was care­fully educated in the schools of 
Tyler and early graduated with honor.  Her first paid literary work 
appeared in the Galveston News, and soon she was a contributor to 
periodi­cals and magazines in the East, her work  commanding fair 
remuneration. Upon the outbreak of the war in 1861 her two older 
brothers, Thos. 0. Moore and Hartwell Moore, enlisted in the 
Confederate army--the first named in the Seventh Texas Infantry, and 
the second in the First Texas Infantry of Hood's Brigade, and both 
served until the surrender.  Mollie E. Moore's patriotism was aroused 
to the highest pitch by the call to arms and by the stirring scenes 
around her.  Her Southern heart leaped in the very exuberance of 
patriotic ardor.  Her pen gave forth verses and songs for the 
departing soldiers, and this writer remembers well the occasion of 
her presenting in Tyler a flag to Co. K. of the Third Texas Cavalry 
and the noble poem she read with such beauty of expression.  In the 
past few years no national re­union of the old veterans in New Orleans 
has been complete without the presence of this gracious woman whom the 
heroes of a hundred bloody battles delight to honor.  She was married 
in Texas in 1874 to Major Thomas E. Davis, of Virginia, and they 
shorrly removed to New Orleans, La., where he became the editor-in chief 
of the New Orleans Picayune.  The published poems. sketches and short 
stories of Mrs. Davis' have attracted wide notice.  She has written 
"Minding the Gap and Other Poems;" "In War Times at La Rose Blanche;"  
"Under the Man-Fig;" "An Elephant's Track, and Other Stories;"  "The 
Wire Cutters;"  "The Queen's Garden;"  'Jaconetta;" and recently "The 
Price of Silence."  Her brief history of Texas entitled, "Under Six
Flags," is as charming as romance albeit an authentic md valuable 
contribution to the annals of the time.  An eminent critic has said that 
her poems are songs of beauty, and her genius is indeed here manifest.  
Her verses appeal like music.

The Moores were for many years residents of Tyler; Their gifted daughter 
was reared and educated here, and the older families of Smith county 
recall her with affectionate interest and regard.  The "Mollie Moore 
Davis Chapter of the Daughters of the Confederacy" in Tyler is named in 
her honor.

In her quaint and picturesque old mansion in Royal street in the French 
quarter of New Orleans--a house with a legendary past-Mrs. Davis lives, 
the recognized head of Louisiana's literati, and the beloved daughter 
of Southern hearts.