turkey red .25
hymn book .25
candlesticks .40
1 sponge .10
1 dictionary .37½
1 shovel 1.12½
1 butter plate .10
stirrup irons 1.25
pocket handkerchief .70
1 bunch plow lines .25
1 set teaspoons .15
1 mill saw file .40
spectacles .50
saltpetre .12½
castor oil .25
1 mackinaw blanket 6.00
leggins .75
mustard .20
12 yards bed ticking 2.70
1 saddle 12.00
1 oz. red precipitate .25
assafoetida ?
indigo 1.25
1 horse collar 1.25
lady’s saddle 11.00
coffee mill .75
hartshorn .10
2 woolen cravats .87½
pepper box .05
bone buttons .25
ribbon .12½
camphor .10
gun lock 1.50
whip 1.00
3 yards jeans 2.00
saddle bags 3.25
gloves .15
quicksilver and pan .97½
1 toothbrush .12½
shoe brushes .25
ink .10
vest pattern 1.00
sifter .50
wafers .10
1 hand saw 1.50
1 spool thread .10
matches .06¼
1 Baptist Harmony .75
1 Panama Hat 3.00
1 box hook and eyes .12½
Borax ?
paregoric .10
1 vial laudanum .10
William Patton Moore
“In Grandpa’s day, Grandpa Captain’s day, he and his wife were great friends to ever’body. They wadn’t nobody that they didn’t recognize and …”
So begins Frank on William Patton Moore—Captain Irish Bill as he was called. He was probably the most flamboyant of the Moore family, and most noted for his rank as a Rebel captain during the War Between the States. This section, as told by Frank Moore, starts with his background so that you can get a feel of life at that day and time:
The Gashes are my grandmother’s side of the house. Her daddy was Tom Gash and her name was Hattie. They lived out in Henderson County, North Carolina. The Gashes were prominent people.
There was five or six children. When Grandma was a child, something got wrong with her parents and one of them died, and just in six weeks, the other one died. So them kids just had to be scattered out. Grandma, she was raised by the Silers at Franklin, North Carolina. They was prominent people of Macon County—some of the wealthiest people over there. They kept slaves.
She was well raised, and when she married Grandpa, they moved over here. She never had had to work. They built a log cabin right up yonder. They just had two windows in it. She went to raising children and housekeeping, and I’ve heard her tell she washed on a washboard and she was real tender. She just busted blisters and her hands would bleed. She made one of the finest women in the world. Raised ten children and, brother, they wanted for nothing. She worked day and night. She could knit faster than a dog. She’d just knit and talk a subject and go right on, just a-knittin’. It was a sight.
They gave Irish Bill his nickname in the army. He joined the army back when that Civil War started. They was a-callin’ ’em in, and one day they called him. At the time, he was a-buildin’ a road. He had a contract and was buildin’ it across Tusquittee Mountain going to Buck Creek. That road went straight across there. Him and Herbert had a contract on that road, and they was a-buildin’ that when the war started. And he was workin’ a great bunch a’ men on that Tusquittee Mountain there, and they come up and told him that he’d been called to the army. And he told his men on the road, so they took their tools around under the crook of the mountain there and dug a hole. They had a big hole in there that they kept their tools in and they just went and stored all the tools in there thinkin’ that he’d get back, or somebody would, you know, but he never did get back to the road.
He joined the army and he stayed a year, and they liked him and they sent him back into the county here to enlist a regiment. He come back here and he got up a big regiment of cavalrymen, and he went back and he stayed in the war with his men till the war was over. And when the war was over, he paid his men off. He was down in Tennessee a-fightin’ the Yankees and they didn’t have no telephone or nothin’, and two weeks after they’d done declared it over, he was still a-fightin’. He hadn’t got the word that it was over. He was still a-fightin’. They told him that the war was over. That they was defeated. And they said, “Now you’ll have to muster your men out any way you can get ’em out.” Says, “We’ve got no way of takin’ ’em home, no finances of no kind. You’ll just have to muster ’em out and let ’em go any way they can.”
He finally come on in home hisself. He brought his horse and his saddle out of the army, and he had ’em here.
The war was just over and they hadn’t set up no law and order, and they was roughriders. The country was just full a’ people a-goin’ through robbin’ each other and takin’ whatever they could get. And my granddaddy and some of the boys was up towards Tusquittee Bald, deer huntin’. Them roughriders come down the road here just takin’ stuff at every house as they come, and they come down by here, and stopped at my grandma’s and they took a lot of things out of the house. He had a gold watch and they took it. Went down to the barn and they took his horse and saddle out of the barn and took it on with ’em and went on down in the country.
Well, he was gone a day or so, and when he come back, he found out about what had took place—roughriders. Well, he got on another horse then, and he decided he’d overtake ’em. He went way into Georgia somewhere, and when he got there, they captured him. They just took him too. And they held him for a week or so. They just took him in the crowd. And he said after so many days he persuaded them to give him back his army horse and his saddle and he brought it back. He never did get his watch, though.
Now when Hattie and Irish Bill first come in here, they had built a little log house up behind this one [that I live in now]. And then they built this house later. They built the log house to live in while they were building this one. The date when they built this house is on the chimney out there. Actually, I think the house was built maybe a year before he built the chimney. I believe it says 1870. Jim Dodd built the house. He went through the country building houses just like this one. Later he went on into town an’ built the Poss house and then went on into Tennessee building.
PLATE 44 Irish Bill on his horse, Dixie, in front of the Macon County, North Carolina, courthouse.
PLATE 45 Irish Bill’s enlistment papers, drawn up when he joined the State Troops of North Carolina on June 25, 1861.
PLATE 46 A document found among Irish Bill’s papers which asks officials and enlisted men to help recruit additional men from their home areas for the South.
PLATE 47 Irish Bill’s resignation from his North Carolina troop.
Jim Neal built these rock chimneys. They’re beautiful chimneys, you know. Built out of pretty rock. You just don’t see such chimneys in the country anymore. Just as straight as a shingle. Looks like they’ve been carved. They’d just come through here and build them for whoever wanted them to. I remember when my granddad got it built. I heard my daddy tell about it. And when he went to have it painted, he had a man come from Asheville. He gave the man a horse as payment.
[As I was saying before, Hattie really started a different kind of life when she first moved in here.] Lots of women would’ve just thrown up their hands and quit but they say she’d wash till the blood came out of her hands and was happy with it. All through the years she never allowed that she knit all the socks them days. She even knit socks for the doctors.
Grandpa had two hundred head of sheep and two hundred head of hogs in the mountains. He’d keep the sheep in th
e summertime, but the hogs stayed in the mountains until the fall of the year. Then they’d come in here with bells on ’em. He had his hogs well trained and in the spring of the year they’d leave; at that time they was worlds of mast—chestnuts and acorns—and them hogs would leave out and they’d go to Fines Creek across the mountain and they’d stay all summer. In the winter, then, it would get rough, and then one day you’d hear bells a-coming and they’d come right back in here.
I don’t remember his mark but our [stock identifying] mark was a crop and an underbit in the left [ear]. That was put on record at Hayesville. If you caught anybody with your stock and your mark, you could go and bring the law on them. And any stock in the mountains over six months old with no mark on it, you could go and shoot ’em down and catch ’em and bring ’em in. But if they had a mark on ’em you had to watch ’em ’cause that [meant they belonged to someone].
They were pretty prominent. At that time there wasn’t but one road out of here and they called it the turnpike back in that day. When they came in here for court at Hayesville—lawyers, judges, solicitors and everything—they would come this way with oxen. There wasn’t any cars. They’d come across Chunkie Gal Gap, and when they came by here they’d spend the night. This home was pretty nice then. Captain Irish Bill and Hattie didn’t turn anybody down. They kept everybody that came through for court. They would stay all night and go back to Franklin. And when I bought this house, the front of it was literally covered up with prominent names. Judges, solicitors, lawyers, surveyors: everybody in the world had signed their names there. There was hundreds of them. Sometimes they’d come in here and survey land and maybe stay here for a week too. People like that would all stay here. Had fireplaces upstairs, you know, and bedrooms.
PLATE 48 An old land plat, drawn on the back of a manila envelope, shows the piece of land (Lot 38) on which Irish Bill and Hattie built their house.
PLATE 49 The house Irish Bill and Hattie built was inherited by Frank and Nannie Moore. She still lives in it today.
PLATE 50 The date 1887 is still visible on the chimney.
Irish Bill had one stud horse called Crockett that was noted all over this country. Since Irish Bill was a captain in the cavalry, he was a great rider. He’d go to Hayesville to the hotel there and stay all day. Then, of the evening when he’d go to come home, he’d get that ol’ Crockett out and he’d ride through town just as hard as that horse could fly. Sometimes they’d put a handkerchief on the ground there in the square and he’d come down with that horse at full speed and swing off and pick that handkerchief up, and that horse just a-running as hard as he could run. Then he’d come on into Tusquittee. He was a noted rider. He was born and raised with horses. That’s all he knew.
Grandpa also had a whaling big barn down there and he kept a lot of race horses. He kept stock. Had a jack and a stud horse. He’d breed all over the country. He’d go to Nantahala, to the flats and everywhere, and stand a stud horse and a jack. Found the license the other day. You have to have a license to stand a jack. He kept a big fine stud horse.
People them days all rode horses, and he had room for their horses and stock. They’d put their stock up and stay a week at a time.
One time him and Doc Ledford got into it up in the cove over the line. They fell out over that line, and Doc was a big man. He was a fighter and liked to fight. Granddaddy, he was a little feller and he wasn’t afraid of nothing, but he knowed Doc would get the best of him if he tried to fight him.
So there was this fence that Granddaddy’d move back over the line, and then Doc’d move it back, and then Granddaddy would move it back over. He went up one day and Doc was a-movin’ it back over, and Granddaddy was a-ridin’ Crockett, and he tried to run Crockett over Doc, and he was just a-makin’ Crockett run all over him too. He had a Jacob’s staff with him to hold a compass. They stick it in the ground and put your compass on it, you know. For land measurin’. And the lower end was sharp, you know, and he got to gougin’ ol’ Crockett in the side with that! They didn’t never get that line settled. They had one line up there that they did get settled but that one line there they never did. And then Doc finally left here. They was neighbors right close to us there. They left here and went into Tennessee.
Another time they brought in a bunch of Western mares here into Hayesville, and Tom Streamer bought one of ’em. It was an outlaw, and there wasn’t nobody in this country that could ride it. It was the awfullest outlaw you ever saw. So Grandpa told Tom to bring her over. Says, “I’ll ride her.” Tom, he lived across the creek, and they came up the road with her and a great crowd had gathered to see him ride that Western mare. French Cabe lived down on the hill with his wife Mary. Somebody told Mary that they was bringing the horse for Grandpa to ride. He was fifty or sixty years old then, getting on up there, but he was going to ride her. Mary saw what was going on and sent one of the kids up here and told Grandma what was taking place. Grandma met them out there and she run ’em off! She wasn’t going to have him get killed on that old Western mare. So instead they tied a sack of turnips on her with ropes as tight as they could get ’em, and she pitched and she bucked till the juice run out of them turnips, just like water! As long as that horse lived she never was broke.
PLATE 51 Standing, left to right: William Patton “Irish Bill” Moore; his daughter, Hattie Virginia (“Jennie”), who married Frank Nolan of Macon County, North Carolina; his youngest daughter, Nannie Elizabeth Kate, who married Clarence Smith; his daughter, Marthey Adelaide (“Addie”), who married Burt Slagle; Henry Moore (brother of J.V.A. Moore, a historian of Clay County), who married Irish Bill’s daughter, Margaret Roxanna Moore; Minnie, who married Irish Bill’s son, John, who became a lawyer in Miami; Jim, one of Irish Bill’s sons, who died with fever at the age of eighteen; Caledonia Ledford (“Donie”), Frank Moore’s mother; John Moore, the lawyer married to Minnie; an unidentified person not part of the family; May Rosebud Moss who had married Irish Bill’s son, Allie Gash Moore.
Middle row, left to right: Harriet (“Hattie”) Naomi Gash, Irish Bill’s wife; John Allen (“Jay”) Moore on Hattie’s lap, son of Margaret Roxanna and Henry Moore; Margaret Roxanna Moore with her daughter, Hattie May, on her lap; Irish Bill’s son, Lawrence Richardson Moore, Frank’s father; Hubbie Ruth Moore, Lawrence Richardson Moore’s daughter; Edna Sallie Moore, another daughter of Lawrence Richardson Moore; Allie Gash Moore with his daughter, Gialia Belle, on his lap.
Seated on the ground, left to right: Ira William, Mattie Ellen, and Paul Henry, all children of Margaret Roxanna and Henry Cornelius Moore.
The race horses Granddaddy raised was all so high-strung he couldn’t work ’em well. My daddy had a team of mules, and Grandpa had a garden near here, and one day he wanted to plow his garden. He didn’t work too much then as he was in his eighties by now, but he wanted a mule and he come t’ get one of our mules. We just had to step out of the field and give him the mule, and he brought it out there and worked an hour or two and put it in the stable in his barn. The barn had racks in the back end of it to feed the horses, and it had a big trough. You had to go in by the horses to get to the trough and he had rows of race horses that he’d raised. He’d move in by ’em to feed ’em in the troughs behind.
[When he came over], we had tried to get him to take our gentle mule. The other mule was mean, and if he thought you was going to whip him or something, he’d kick you. But Granddad wadn’t afraid of nothing. He said, “I want that mule,” meaning Old Rubin, the mean one. The other one was Kingbolt. He brought Rubin down and went down in the field and plowed about an hour. Then he tied him up to a tree and went over to the creek and fished. He took an old sheepskin with him, and he laid down on the sheepskin when he finished fishing and took a nap.
Along about dinnertime, he come back and fed the mule in the stable, and he always carried his corn in a big half-bushel split basket—the kind that you used to hang on your arm—and he carried his corn in that. He went in by that mule to feed him the corn, an
d when he got in even with him, it scared the mule and he just whirled around and went to kickin’. Kicked Granddad into the trough and broke his ribs and he took pneumonia and died. He was as strong as he could be, though, and probably would have lived way up into the nineties if he hadn’t gotten killed then.
Grandpa lived through some rough times. After the war, he used to carry the mail from Hayesville to the Wayah Gap. He carried it on a horse and met somebody from Franklin at the Wayah Gap, and they’d take the mail on and he’d come back. He said sometimes he’d cross the mountain and run up on big bears and his horse’d try to run away with him. He couldn’t do nothing with it. There’d be bears across the road and his horse’d be afraid of ’em.
Macon County was home for Grandma and him too, and sometimes he would take the children and they’d go across Tusquittee Mountain and through the Wayah Gap to Macon County to visit their people. He was very much of a daredevil. He wadn’t afraid of nothin’. And the Nantahala River is a river that’s clear—even when it’s up, it’s clear. You can’t tell hardly when it’s up, for it’s just clear all the time. He was a-comin’ across this way one time from Macon County, and he come over there to the Monday Place where you had to ford the Nantahala River. It was a big wide ford and I’ve forded it many of a time. It had come a awful hard rain on the head of the river and he didn’t believe it was up that high. He knew it was up, but he thought he could make it anyhow. He drove his wagon into the river and he got about halfway in, and it washed one of his horses under the tongue, and the other’n fell back over the tongue and they both drowned right there in the middle of the river. He was settin’ there, water about to take his wagon down, and the horses both drowned there. He had to cut ’em out of the harness and just let ’em go on down the river.
Tryin’ times he had in them days. That was way back in the days when it was wild.
Below we have reprinted, as written, a letter that Frank has in his collection. It was sent to Irish Bill while he was serving in the War, but because the letter is incomplete, we do not know who it is from. Since it was sent from Tusquittee, however, it must have been from a member of his family.
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