“When the late war at last ground to its bitter end, most men, both gray and blue, laid aside their arms and made what return they could to their former lives… or to such a likeness of normalcy as this battered Republic might then afford.
Even those unfortunate enough to bear the marks of shot and shell were commonly fitted with wooden limbs or crude contrivances, and sent back to their fields, shops, and trades, to labor as best they were able.

Yet Sergeant Ulisses T. Moore was not numbered among such men.

While serving with the Palmetto Sharpshooters in the year 1864, he was struck by a cannon-ball which carried away a grievous portion of his lower body.
By all reckoning, it should have ended his usefulness in this world, instead, upon his return home, he set himself at once to tinkering and experiment, as though the war had only sharpened his resolve rather than broken it.

It was not long before his attention settled upon the steam mechanism employed upon the railroads, which he judged to be both practical and capable of far greater refinement.
Applying its principles, he constructed what he himself termed a “self-propelled rolling chair”, driven by steam and the simple pull of a lever, it was an object which drew no small measure of astonishment from those who first beheld it.

Having sold off his farm to fund his labors, and having brought his designs to a high state of perfection, Moore soon turned his talents fully to the improvement of steam locomotives, in this field he worked what many could only call miracles, making engines both swifter and more durable, whilst at the same time reducing their hunger for coal.

His abilities did not go unnoticed, in a remarkably short span of years, he came to hold a near monopoly upon the business of locomotive improvement, and under his influence the iron road was transformed into the most reliable means of conveyance the nation had yet known.
Alas, his dominion was not destined to be a long one.

On the sixteenth day of March, 1882, Sergeant Moore succumbed to complications arising from a severe infection, and was carried off at the age of but fifty-two years, thus was proven once more the old and sorrowful truth that wealth, genius, and industry alike must bow before death, and that no man, however mighty his works, may purchase his escape from it.”

Photograph of the late Ulisses Moore (1830-1882), circa 1879