Clarence Bloomfield-Moore (1852-1936); unmarried; Clara Bloomfield-Moore's son. Became renown archeologist with extensive digs and work throughout Florida. Sued his own mother Clara Bloomfield-Moore to lay claim to the family fortune.
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In 1873, a 21-year-old named
Clarence Bloomfield Moore was vacationing in Florida after he had completed college at Harvard. He went to a nearby shell mound, took a stick, dug into the mound, and pulled out artifacts and skeletal remains. He was immediately fascinated. He started visiting exotic locations around the world when his father, a wealthy paper company owner in Philadelphia, unexpectedly died. Moore returned to Philadelphia and took charge of the company, building millions in profits. In 1891 at the age of 39, he devoted the remainder of his life to excavating mounds and collecting artifacts for a museum in Philadelphia - all at his own expense. His stated goal was to excavate every mound near a navigable river or waterway in the the entire South. He built a sternwheel boat specially equipped for this purpose. He had a crew of 6-7 on the boat and an excavation crew of 14-20. He began his excavations in Florida and ended them there in 1920, nearly 30 years later. One the first "sand mounds" he excavated in Florida yielded the artifact below. It is a 10.5-inch square copper sheet engraved with curious symbols. Moore never learned what the symbols meant, but today we know the symbol as an
ogee inside a forked eye. No one has calculated precisely how many mounds Moore excavated or destroyed, but the number is in the thousands. Many of the sites mentioned by Moore in his massive, voluminous reports issued by a Philadelphia Museum have never been found. Moore occasionally described his excavations at mounds as "obliterating" or leveling them. However, he always had a landowner's permission. All of the artifacts he recovered and sent to the Philadelphia museum are now in the Smithsonian. (Illustration from Moore, 1894.) [The Illustrated Encyclopedia of Native American Indian Mounds & Earthworks, by Gregory L. Little, Ed. D.; 2016; Eagle Wing Books, Inc.; ISBN: 978-0-940829-58-9]
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See Also
Clara Bloomfield-Moore
Letter from Bloomfield-Moore to Brinton
Mrs. Bloomfield-Moore Dead
Mrs. Moore on the Keely Motor
Was Keely a Fraud
