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Farming For A Better Future, page 295
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While the Town of Mooresville has had a majority white population historically, as a census district, Mooresville included communities such as Belle Mina, which were mostly African American. Between 1900 and 1940, the Mooresville census district contained about 350 to 430 households. In 1900 and 1910, there were only between five and seven African American landowners in the Mooresville area, or only one or two percent of the total population. In the following decades, there were four times as many landowning African American farmers: 20 in 1920 and 21 in 1930, which represented five percent of the population. The peak number of African American farm owner/operators in Mooresville was 28, or eight percent of all households, in 1940.
Although the Mooresville census district included the Town of Belle Mina, which had a large population of African American farmers and landowners, few were included the district. It may be that some of the African American landowners were in the adjacent districts of Greenbrier and Quid Nunc-Tanner. Some of the farmers of color who owned farms in the Mooresville area included John Page, Gilliam Thatch, Anthony Hayes, and Robert Pryor, who owned farms between about 1900 and 1940. Several families were able to pass down land from father to son or husband to widow. Few women owned land in this area at the time, but if they did, they were most likely widows. The Harris, Thompson, Hobbs, Jefferson, and Anderson families were African American farm owners in this area.
(First) 1900 Federal Census Showing John Page and Anthony Hayes (National Archives and Records Administration via Ancestry. com) (Second) 1900 Federal Census Showing the Yarbrough Family (National Archives and Records Administration via
Ancestry.com) (Third) 1910 Federal Census Showing Gilliam Thatch (National Archives and Records Administration via Ancestry.com) (Fourth) 1930 Federal Census Showing Robert Pryor (National Archives and Records Administration via Ancestry.com)
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Moses Chapel and Moses Temple School*
Originally referred to as Moses Chapel, as seen on the 1935 USGS topographic map, the church is located northeast of the intersection of Looney Road and Lindsay Lane with Compton Road. A church building remains there today and is known as the Moses Temple Cumberland Presbyterian Church in America.
The church also hosted the Moses Temple School for children of color from 1939 to the late 1960s. The first teacher was Ms. Clara Mason. Other teachers
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