Moore was born in Ossining in Westchester County on September 18, 1843. He was the son of Benjamin Moore and Mary Elizabeth Moore. His younger siblings were brother Casimir de Rham Moore, and sister Katherine T. Moore. His father was the eldest son of Catharine Moore and Clement Clarke Moore, today known as the author of the Christmas poem "A Visit from St. Nicholas". His paternal grandfather was the son of Bishop Benjamin Moore, the head of the Episcopal Diocese of New York and President of Columbia University. His paternal grandmother was a descendant of the Van Cortlandt family. His aunt Margaret Moore, and after her death, his aunt, Mary Clarke Moore, were married to John Doughty Ogden of the Ogden family. His father's first cousin, Nathaniel Fish Moore, also served as president of Columbia University from 1842 to 1849.
Career
During the Civil War, Moore was a major in the Union Army. Following the War, he was a cotton broker until he received his share of his grandfather's estate in 1901, at which point he moved to Paris with his family.
Moore inherited his grandfather's estate, named Chelsea, located on the west side of the island of Manhattan above Houston Street, which was mostly open countryside before the 1820s. It had been owned by his grandfather's maternal grandfather, Maj. Thomas Clarke, a retired British veteran of the French and Indian War. Clarke named his house for the Royal Hospital Chelsea in London that served war veterans. His grandfather inherited the property from his mother, Charity Clarke Moore in 1813. In 1883, the elder Moore was offered $40,000 for the Chelsea farm. He seriously considered selling, but decided to keep the property and its value grew exponentially as the area developed. The estate was later passed down to his father, Benjamin Moore, and then to Moore and his family upon his father's death. The contemporary Manhattan neighborhood is known as Chelsea after his estate.
Society life
In 1892, Moore and his wife were both included in Ward McAllister's "Four Hundred", purported to be an index of New York's best families, published in The New York Times. Conveniently, 400 was the number of people that could fit into Mrs. Astor's ballroom. Mrs. Moore was "the first society woman to ride a bicycle in Newport."
Barrington Moore Sr., a forester who was married to Muriel Hennen Morris, the daughter of Frances Isabel Morris and Thurlow Weed Barnes, in 1910.
Benjamin Moore, who married Alexandra Emery, sister of Lela, Audrey, Thomas, and John Emery, in 1920. After his death in 1938, she remarried to Robert McKay.
Through his son William, he was the grandfather of four boys, Adrian P. Moore, David E. Moore, Richard Moore, and William S. Moore Jr., the last two both died in World War II. Through his son Barrington, he was the grandfather of Barrington Moore Jr., a political sociologist known for his work Social Origins of Dictatorship and Democracy: Lord and Peasant in the Making of the Modern World, and Dr. Peter Van Cortlandt Moore, a physician who was a professor of psychiatry at Georgetown University Hospital. Through his son Benjamin, he was the grandfather of Alexander Moore, a Harvard graduate and decorated World War II fighter pilot.
