Aunt Julia Moore
Major Julia Wheeler Moore 1905 – 1961| parents
of Greenwood SC
Major Julia Wheeler Moore never married:
1906 Julia born 21 Jan 1905
1909 Moore Sisters: Julia and Bess
Julia ca 1913
Julia went to High School at Mars Hill with her cousins standing in front of the boarding home across the street from the school.
Front: Julia Moore, Mary Belch, unknown, Hazel Sessoms, teacher (faded)
back: James Rayner, Alice Rayner (Dilday), unknown, unknown, John Rayner.
1905 Mars Hill School ca. 1924
Notice the well at the front left corner of the building as well as the Model T Fords in the yard
photo compliments of Clyde Miller and Lynn McCarthy
The Mars Hill School Boarding House & Teacherage ca. 1924
photo compliments of Clyde Miller and Lynn McCarthy
Aunt Julia and Cousin Alice told us about the living arrangements there.
The girls slept on the second floor; the boys were on the first floor. It seems that the girls kept their chamber pot in a closet above where the boys hung their coats — so to liven things up a little they would make a crash upstairs and yell “Look out below! Dirty water!” just to get the boys to scramble to get their things out of the closet.
Alice Rayner and Julia Moore sitting on Raynor Moore’s car at Mars Hill
ca 1919 at Maple Lawn
at the well at Maple Lawn ca 1921
Julia’s graduation picture
from Norfolk General’s nursing school
1929: Cotten, Raynor, Jim holding John, Julia holding Julia
Julia became a government nurse serving at the Marine Hospital in Norfolk.
She was on the staff there when I was born at home. And my father had a ruptured appendix by the time he arrived at the hospital. She and her boyfriend at that time, who happened to be the chief surgeon, took one look at my father and immediately operated. Dad was out of it for several days, but Julia had the doctor save and show him the rotten gut he had removed. [She said, ‘My brother would never have taken our word on the close a call he had had.”]
Later Julia was assigned in the Western US to serve the Native Americans.
After World War II she was assigned to a hospital in Germany.
Then about 1950, it was discovered that she had lung cancer. She had been a chain smoker as so many of the nurses of that era. The doctors managed to free her of cancer.
Julia retired on disability and she and a friend Nancy Wertz, also a government nurse on disability, built a home in Greenwood, SC near Nancy’s family. They soon planted an orchard and grape vineyard [like Maple Lawn] and raised fishing worms to go fishing in the streams with bamboo poles. It was a comfortable home. That’s what I remember from my visits there.
Bess, Aunt Nell & Julia 1955
photo by Nancy Wertz
When Aunt Bessie developed cancer of the stomach – Julia and Nancy took care of her at Bessie’s home in Norfolk.
Nov 1959 5 Generations
(not direct line of course)
Mary Ann McMillan Wilber top left,
her great Aunt Julia W Moore (sister of Grandmother Bessie Pierce), her aunt Betty Pierce Hickey (sister of her mother, Mary Pierce McMillan),
Seated is her great, great Aunt Nell Rayner Myers (sister of her great grandmother Johnnie Rayner Moore) and Ronnie or Donnie (no one is certain which) Wilber.
Day of Bess Pierce’s funeral. Photo by Nancy Wertz
On the fourth of June 1961, Julia suddenly had a coughing spell that broke loose some of the scar tissue in her lungs and died choking on her blood.
As she had requested, she was brought back to Maple Lawn to lay in state in the parlor and then was buried beside her mother in the Jones’ Hole Cemetery.