J.M. Jerry Moore

J. M. "Uncle Jerry" Moore was born on May 28, 1848, on the hill in Marshall, Texas, where the College of Marshall later stood. He was enslaved by Fanny Van Zandt, widow of Isaac Van Zandt, a founder of Marshall. His mother, Amy, a Tennessean, was a seamstress for the family, so they lived in town. Other enslavers called the Van Zandt people "free niggers" because, Jerry said, the family taught them all to read and write, let them earn money, and kept the patrollers away. At emancipation Fanny Van Zandt gave his mother two acres of land.

His father, Henry Moore, had been enslaved in Alabama by a man who freed nearly everyone before the war but kept three men to pay a debt. Henry bid $800 for himself at the sale, and no one bid against him. As a free man of color he could not live among the enslaved and had to have a white guardian until after the war. During Reconstruction, Henry Moore was elected to the 11th and 12th Texas Legislatures from Harrison County.

Jerry remembered soldiers drilling in Marshall in 1860, and the railroad from Caddo Lake that signaled news with its whistle: three long, mournful blasts for bad news, three short ones for good. He described the Black voters of Reconstruction marching double file to the courthouse, and Harrison County becoming a refuge for freed people under federal protection. He worked as a brick mason for fifty years after freedom, and in old age lived alone on the Port Caddo road on a fifteen-dollar pension.