Irish-born Patrick Moore and his wife, Sarah, loved children.
Moore was a wealthy and popular man, elected three times to the San Luis Obispo County Board of Supervisors, but the missing element in his life, and in Sarah’s, was the children they wanted to have but couldn’t.
They had room for them. The Moores built a big Victorian home at the southern approach to Arroyo Grande, sadly demolished years later to make way for the 101. But they began to fill that house: they adopted two local orphans, Hattie and Mamie Tyler. Their niece, Annie Gray, came to live with them, too.
So the Moore home, on birthdays, Easters, and Christmases, was filled with local children, the friends of the surrogate daughters who lived there.
Moore believed in education and was a staunch supporter of the new high school (1893), which some citizens saw as a frivolity. He defended the school fiercely when he and his friends gathered for libations at the Ryan Hotel on Branch Street.
He believed in higher education, as well.
If the Moore home was so often noisy with children, there was a quiet place: Patrick’s den. It was there that he wrote the checks that paid for the college educations of many Arroyo Grande youths, including his niece Annie, a proud graduate of the University of California, Berkeley.
Editor’s Note: Read more about Patrick Moore’s descendants in this post on Jim Gregory’s blog.