Moses Harris (c.1850 - 1905)

Moses Harris was born into slavery between 1848-1851, likely in Virginia. By late 1862 he was living in Tennessee, enslaved on a plantation near Murfreesboro. As the Stone's River battle raged nearby and the Confederate Army was about to retreat, his enslaver Mrs. Harris gave him an "old blind white horse" and told him to head towards the Union Army lines. Moses came across Company A of the 13th OVI and worked for Captain RB Crawford for the remainder of the war. When the 13th OVI was disbanded in 1866 after the end of the war, most of its soldiers returned to their homes in Massillon, Ohio, and Moses Harris followed.

Harris worked at the Massillon Contracting and Building Company in the 1880s, as seen in this photograph. He took various jobs throughout his time living in Massillon, and occasionally in Canton. He was part of a group of Black residents that founded Massillon's Hall Memorial School for Colored Girls, a domestic science training school, which opened in 1904.

He married May Hampton likely in the 1880s. They had two daughters. His daughter Blanche was born in 1888, and his other daughter has not been researched. In the early 1900s, the Harris family moved to Newton Falls in Trumbull County, Ohio, where Moses fell ill in the spring of 1905 and died in June.