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

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39 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 in the First North Carolina Regiment led by his uncle, General James Moore, in September. His unit was engaged at the Battle of Moore's Creek in February 1776, and Moore was in Charleston defending Fort Moultrie in June that year. The Revolutionary War exacted a heavy toll on this branch of the Moores, however. Within one year, his older brother, Maurice III, died in battle; his brother-in-law, Francis Nash, was killed in Germantown; and his uncle and his father died from disease within days of each other in January 1777. On March 8, 1777, Moore resigned his commission in the Continental Army to return to Buchoi and care for his remaining family.93 For the next several years,Moore(who inherited Buchoi at the death of his father and elder brother) oversaw the management of his family plantation, although rice exports ceased between 1777 and 1780. Also circa 1777, Moore married Susannah (or Susan) Elizabeth Eagles, whose family's plantation neighbored Buchoi, and started his own small family.94 As a colonel in the local militia, Moore engaged in acts of sabotage and guerilla warfare against Tory supporters in the region during this period. When the British landed in Wilmington in January 1781, Moore led militiamen in a defense of their community, who inflicted heavy losses on British troops and supply lines. However,having left Buchoi and its occupants undefended in the process, British forces occupied Buchoi and seized his assets.British Major James Craig offered Moore both amnesty and the return of his property if Moore ceased rebellion. When Moore refused the conditions, Buchoi was plundered.95 By the end of 1781, Moore was practicing law; by February 1782, he was riding the circuit with Judge John Williams and a young lawyer named William Richardson Davie. While the trio were passing through Hillsborough on their way to Salem, they were asked to try seven captured men who had served Colonel David Fanning,a British Loyalist.Moore prosecuted the men while Davie defended his first case, but all the defendants were sentenced to hang for their part in a raid on Hillsborough.96 Later in 1782,Moore was selected as a Senator representing Brunswick County in the state legislature. By the beginning of 1783, Moore had been appointed the state's Attorney General, a position he held through the remainder of the decade. Much of his work in the early 1780s was prosecuting former Tories and Loyalists. His most notable case as Attorney General was his participation in Bayard v. Singleton in 1787,which was"the first major case to thoroughly address the doctrine of judicial review."97 With the signing of the Treaty of Paris in 1783, the U.S. Congress agreed to return property that had been confiscated during the Revolutionary War to Loyalist Americans. However, the North Carolina state legislature had, both during the war and after, passed acts that allowed the seizure of Loyalist property as well as a ban from hearing lawsuits from former Loyalists in the state courts. Spyers Singleton, a New Bern merchant, had benefitted from these acts when he purchased the confiscated property of Samuel Cornell, a Loyalist who had fled to England in 1775. In 1787, Elizabeth Cornell Bayard sued to have her father's property (which he had deeded to his wife and daughters) restored to her. Moore and Abner Nash represented Singleton, while Bayard's lawyers—Samuel Johnston and William R. Davie—argued that the 1785 act to prohibit litigation brought by Loyalists was in direct violation of the state's 1776 constitution guaranteeing citizen's the right to a jury trial in cases of property rights. The three judges overseeing the decision—Samuel Ashe, Samuel Spenser, and John Williams—was aware Section 8 page 37