Agenda 02-03-2026; 8-i - National Register Recommendation for Moorefields

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38 United States Department of the Interior National Park Service/National Register of Historic Places Registration Form NPS Form 10-900 OMB Control No.1024-0018 Moorefields (Additional Documentation) Orange County, N.C. Name of Property County and State bank's aegis, the house was renovated again and prepared for a caretaker's residency. Today, the upper floor is inhabited while the ground floor is available for tours by appointment only. The property is maintained as a wildlife refuge that abuts the county's 300-acre Seven Mile Creek Nature Preserve. Few changes have been made to the grounds in the 21 st century. The dilapidated barn was demolished in 2014 and a prefabricated shed added northwest of the house in 2015. A historic wooden shed was also relocated to the property, northwest of the house, in the 2010s. In 2019, the county built a trail network in the adjacent nature preserve and created a small gravel parking area off of the Moorefields drive,just south of the estate.89 CRITERION B: SIGNIFICANCE IN RELATION TO ALFRED MOORE (1755-1810) Moorefields is eligible for the National Register of Historic Places at the statewide level for significance under Criterion B in the area of politics/government for its association with Alfred Moore (1755-1810). Specifically, Moorefields is associated with Moore's productive life in several public service roles from 1783 to 1804, a timespan that coincides with his construction of Moorefields as a summer home or base near the state's emerging seats of power. Perhaps more importantly,Moore was seminal in the creation of the University of North Carolina(1789),located only 10 miles south of Moorefields, and was one of the institution's most generous, early benefactors. Moorefields, by its very name, is fundamentally associated with the first Alfred Moore. Early biographies of Moore claim an aristocratic ancestry based in Ireland, Scotland, and/or Great Britain.90 What is known is that his great-grandfather—James Moore—was the first to immigrate to North America via Barbados in 1675. By 1700, James Moore (a wealthy planter as well as a general in the British army) had been made the governor of South Carolina. His three sons— Maurice, Roger, and Nathaniel—were instrumental in settling the Lower Cape Fear region of present-day North Carolina in the mid-1720s. Now headed by Maurice, the Moore family platted Brunswick Town in 1725,the first permanent,Anglo-American settlement on the Cape Fear River. Brunswick Town developed into a thriving deep-water port until it was surpassed by Wilmington, founded 13 miles upriver in the 1730s. By the 1740s, some 1,200 members of the Moore family lived in southeastern North Carolina. "Of the 115,000 acres of Cape Fear land patented by 1731, almost 25,000 acres were acquired by both Maurice and Roger. Thirteen other Goose Creek planters, related to the Moores by either blood or marriage and consequently referred to as the `Family,' also received large grants, averaging about 2,000 acres each."91 The founders had secured the best river lands and tamed a wilderness, converting the landscape into a plantation society that used large gangs of enslaved labor to cultivate rice.92 This was the pedigree and milieu into which Alfred Moore was born on May 21, 1755, at his family's Cape Fear River plantationBuchoiin New Hanover County. Moore was meant to study the law and follow in the footsteps of his father,Maurice Moore II,who was a colonial judge. In 1764, at the young age of nine, Alfred Moore's mother died, his father remarried, and he was sent to Boston for his education; he was there in 1768 when British troops occupied the city. By April 1775, young Moore had returned to North Carolina and attained his license to practice law. Not long thereafter,however,revolution erupted, and he was appointed a captain(at the age of 20) Section 8 page 36