Family of Perry MOSES and Rosalie Virginia LEVY

Fourth child and third son of Octavia Harby and Andrew Jackson Moses,

Perry Moses was born in Sumterville in 1844 and spent most of his

first 16 years in the familyʼs Washington Street home. During the war

he served with Kershawʼs 2nd South Carolina Regiment and later was

sent to Mississippi and Alabama where his brothers Joshua and Horace

were stationed. Jack Levy, a friend of Perryʼs father, had moved his

family to Mobile, Alabama, sometime after the Union forces captured

New Orleans in April 1862. Levy took the Moses boys under his wing and

invited them to his home for dinner. According to family lore, the

Levy daughters Rosalie and Adele peeped through the blinds and each

claimed a man: Rose indeed later married Perry and Adele, Perryʼs

brother Jack.

Perry and Rosalie returned to Sumter, but soon moved to the Louisiana

bayou country where they lived for 12 years, working in the fields

side by side. Again, family legend claims that Rose picked three

hundred pounds of cotton the day her fourth child was born. After the

birth of their sixth child, the couple moved to Bell Buckley,

Tennessee, then back to Sumter where Perry opened a sawmill and lumber

business. He later owned a cotton oil mill and farmed on the side. In

1892, Perryʼs mother sold her old home, which had been used for three

years as a graded school, to her daughter-in-law, Rosalie, and it once

again became the center of Moses family life.