On his 90th: A train took his leg, but SC scholar John Hammond Moore keeps to history’s drumbeat

After almost 90 years, 25 books, numerous articles and millions of words, Columbia historian John Hammond Moore sums up any advice he might have for others this way:

“Keep going.”

For decades, this historian/journalist/scholar has done just that: Kept traveling. Researching. Interviewing. Editing. Teaching. Writing. He’s delved into a gazillion topics from Confederate food to German prisoners of war in America during World War II, to lynchings in South Carolina to a pre-Hollywood biography of 1940s era movie star Errol Flynn.

“John is so thorough, so careful in his writing – he’s made major contributions to our understanding of South Carolina history,” says Allen Stokes, who for 25 years was director of the University of South Carolina’s Caroliniana Library, the state’s major university history repository.

Moore even kept going after – at the age of 84 in 2009 – he climbed between two railroad cars blocking Pickens Street when the train gave a lurch. He fell, and a 30-plus ton railroad car lopped off his right leg inches above his right knee. At the time, he was impatient to get to Caroliniana.

“I thought the thing was stopped,” Moore allows in the laconic way of his birth state, Maine. “I won’t be doing that again.”

He doesn’t dwell on that mishap, but when pressed says he wished the train wheel had amputated his leg below the knee so he could walk without a walker. Walking – a favorite trek was Congaree National Park – has always helped him think better about the subjects he writes about, he says.

On Oct. 20, in honor of Moore’s 90th birthday, fans and friends – including Stokes, well-known businessman John Rainey, Columbia mover Sam McCuen and lawyer Ken Childs – plan to honor him with a $75-a-plate, all-you-can-eat celebration of his life and works at one of his favorite libraries, USC’s Thomas Cooper.

“John’s history on Columbia and Richland County is a classic,” says Debbie Bloom, manager of the Walker Local and Family History Center at Richland County’s main branch. “We refer to that daily – there’s such obscure information in there – even neighborhood information – details that might not be important to you or me. But there’s somebody who’s going to walk in” and ask a question that send us to the book, she said.

Moore is a historian, but of an altogether different species than, say, University of South Carolina’s high-profile professor Walter Edgar. Edgar, the professor emeritus of Southern studies, now retired, has published a best-selling tome of S.C. history, edited a 1,927-entry S.C. encyclopedia and still hosts a widely aired weekly public radio interview show.

Edgar says of Moore: “He is a really fine local historian. The works he’s done, whether it’s (on) the newspapers of South Carolina, an event or an institution, are just absolutely first rate. If you were to count up the number of entries in the S.C. Encyclopedia, we asked him to write more than any other single author.”

If Edgar is a brand name, a lion on the state’s history landscape, Moore – asked what kind of an animal he would be – likens himself to a polar bear, a scrappy, solitary animal always on the prowl.

Unlike tenured professors at large universities who get to take paid sabbaticals and can draft squads of graduate students to help with research, Moore worked mostly by himself on most of his 25 books.

He has been a writer-for-hire, as when the S.C. Department of Transportation paid him to research and write a history of the highway department in South Carolina. He also has had his work accepted by five different university presses, including seven books by the University of South Carolina Press.

It’s not easy to be published by a university press. A writer has to submit a detailed proposal that is reviewed by experts in the field the writer wants to write in. The final manuscript receives intense scrutiny for accuracy and documentation.

“John’s research is impeccable,” says Alex Moore (no relation), an editor at USC Press who played a role in acquiring several of Moore’s works. Alex Moore says some of those are still classics, indispensable to historians. “I’ve used his books extensively, both in my own work and as tools for evaluating manuscripts we get here.”

John Hammond Moore is the kind of scholar who will interrupt his own research at libraries to help others, friends say. “He gave freely of this time and knowledge to graduate students from other institutions and even provided a place to stay for some,” Stokes said.

Richland County local history librarian Bloom said Moore has had a profound effect on her life. After his accident several years ago, he asked her if she would check out footnote references in the manuscript he had put together. He would have done that but couldn’t now with his leg gone. So Bloom wound up doing field trips to places like Darlington County Historical Society and the S.C. Archives to double-check Moore’s work.

“It gave me a bit of confidence that John thought so well of me, of my ability to check, so I decided to write a paper of my own,” says Bloom. That paper was just published as an article in the S.C. Historical Association’s journal. “He really gave me the confidence to do that.”

None of Moore’s books have been best-sellers. Of the seven titles published by the University of South Carolina, “A Plantation Mistress on the Eve of the Civil War” – featuring the diary of a Richland County widow who lived on her plantation with 200 slaves – has sold the most, with more than 5,000 copies. His favorite is the “Faustball Tunnel: German POWs in America and their Great Escape.” The book was published by Random House. Research on it took him from the Library of Congress to Germany to track down former prisoners of war.

Step by step

A visit to Moore’s 11/2-story brick house near Five Points is a trip back in time.

In the hall is an old-timey rotary telephone. It still works. The walls are hung with old maps, pictures and posters. Tables and shelves contain a miscellany of odds and ends, from a stuffed owl to a ceramic leprechaun. One of Moore’s hobbies is collecting discarded items and taking them home. In fact, he found the oil painting of a Haitian market that hangs over his living room mantle on a curb years ago.

“Where’d you grow up?” Moore asks a reporter, “How did you get into newspapers? Where does your last name come from?” Rarely do people who are being interviewed evince the slightest interest in the journalist. When a photographer shows up, Moore asks, “What’s your background?”

He is sitting up, his metal leg touching the floor. Little by little, his story emerges, loaded with little nuggets about this and that, including that his house was “Mayor Finlay’s boyhood home.” (Finlay was Columbia mayor in the 1980s.)

Moore was born in 1924 on a potato farm just feet from the Canadian border. Although his middle name is Hammond, he is not at all of the South Carolina Hammonds. He was blessed, he says, to be in a community that valued quality public education, and that’s where he got his early schooling.

In World War II, he joined the U.S. Navy. Placed on a ship that fired rockets, he sailed from Charleston, through the Panama Canal, across the Pacific and took part in the 1945 battle of Okinawa.

After the war, he worked for a small Maine daily newspaper, finished college and got a doctoral degree at the University of Virginia. He has held a succession of teaching jobs, including stints at Winthrop, Georgia State and Macquarie, an Australian university. In 1985, he came to Columbia and settled, plunging into state history and frequenting local libraries.

In his working habits, he’s neat and organized, shunning messy desks, at times using file folders or looseleaf binders to keep track of things. He starts by reading books and newspapers, then branching out and tracking down human sources and papers from there. He has often done his own indexes, a time-consuming chore.

“The secret to indexing is having many little pieces of paper, put the name on each one, and then put all the A’s in one pile, the B’s in another and so on. Then, straighten them out.” As he explains this, he pulls out a thin little book called “Indexing Your Book,” a 1964 work published by the University of Wisconsin press. “It’s very helpful.”

Sam McCuen, who worked at the Department of Transportation in the 1980s when Moore was working on his highway book, worked with Moore on that book. “He’s the calmest, most organized, step-by-step, analytical person I ever met in my life,” says McCuen, who still sees Moore monthly at a gathering of Columbia area media and literary folks.

He is unabashedly un-modern. He writes on an electric typewriter. He rarely uses email. He doesn’t own a smartphone. He doesn’t do Twitter or Facebook. He believes that a writer owes the reader not only the facts but a summary of what the writer has found: “After all the digging you’ve done, what does it add up to?”

A lasting legacy

A half-dozen friends drop by regularly to bring Moore food, take him out or just to visit. He no longer drives.

Asked if he has any regrets, the lifelong bachelor says maybe he should have stayed in one place longer. (He has been in South Carolina some 30 years.) And: “Maybe I should have gotten married at some point.” Are your books your children? he is asked. He smiles. “Apparently,” he says.

Some of those children will be around a long while.

“I have 10 of his books on my bookshelf,” says Herb Hartsook, director of political collections for USC’s libraries, who has known Moore for years. He finds many of Moore’s books so useful and entertaining, he has given away as gifts “maybe six titles to 30 people over the years.”

Currently, Moore has a manuscript about Gamecock Trivia under consideration by University of South Carolina Press. It’s full of hundreds of short, interesting facts and anecdotes about the state’s major public university, he says.

Asked what he is working on now, Moore is as brief as ever. “Answering your questions,” he says.

Any more advice?

“Finish the course,” he says. “Take notes.”

This story was originally published October 11, 2014 at 8:24 PM with the headline "On his 90th: A train took his leg, but SC scholar John Hammond Moore keeps to history’s drumbeat."