The Magazine Antiques

After college Roddy worked at Colonial Williamsburg, first in the rifle maker’s shop with Wallace Gusler, and then in archaeological conservation with Audrey and Ivor Noel Hume. He also briefly taught math in middle school. A master of arts in American folk culture from the renowned Coopers­town Graduate Program at the State University of New York College at Oneonta led him to Mountain Empire Community College in Big Stone Gap, Virginia, where he started an annual music and crafts festival that continues today. These experiences paved the way for becoming director of Ferrum College’s Blue Ridge Institute and Museum in the foothills of the mountains that frame Virginia’s Shenandoah Valley. At Ferrum Roddy oversees the institute’s galleries, its renowned archives, a farm museum, and extensive educational programs.

Sally Flieger had never heard of Roddy Moore when she accepted a position to teach horseback riding at Ferrum. She had barely settled into new quarters when she looked out her window one day to see an uninvited stranger coming down her drive in a pickup truck. “He had hardly introduced himself when he asked if he could borrow three of my prized horses for the opening of Blue Ridge Institute’s new Farm Museum,” she remembers, admitting wryly, “I was not impressed.” Despite the inauspicious start, Roddy Moore and Sally Flieger found that they had much in common, and after dating for a year, they married.  Together they have raised two daughters, Samantha and Allison, and over the course of three decades, have built one of the finest and most comprehensive collections of regional material in the South.

The Moores have collected what they love, and love what they have collected. Their interests reflect their commitment to understanding the world around them—and to sharing what they have discovered. They have played a seminal role in rediscovering a tremendous range of regional artifacts—far more than most collectors and historians had thought possible. Perhaps most important, they have collaborated on invaluable monographs about many artisans whose lives and work would otherwise have been lost to history. In doing so they have helped Americans understand the cultural richness of the inland South.   

One of the areas of research and collecting that the Moores are most passionate about is regional music­—especially the instruments and music that defined the nineteenth-century southern experience. Banjos and gourd fiddles hang from virtually every wall (see Figs. 2, 10), and a huge basket in a corner of the living room contains a collection of Virginia dulcimers, many with carved scroll ends. As with their other collections, their interests here extend beyond the material objects themselves to encompass the culture they define.

Indeed, Roddy’s inquiries have spurred invaluable research and numerous publications for the Blue Ridge Institute as well as some of the most popular exhibitions in the institute’s galleries.  He and Vaughan Webb have overseen the digitization of more than four thousand regional recordings and have augmented these with music they have discovered in their fieldwork. As a result, Blue Ridge Institute’s archive of this region’s music is one of the most comprehensive anywhere. It has spurred a two CD set entitled Virginia Rocks: The History of Rockabilly in the Commonwealth, and nine CDs published as The Virginia Tradition Series, for which Roddy and Vaughan have produced recordings that include Non-Blues Secular Black Music; Native Virginia Ballads and Songs; Ballads from British Tradition; and Tidewater Blues. Two of the series received Grammy nominations in recognition of the educational packets the staff compiled to accompany the recordings.

The Moores’ love of animals, especially Percheron horses, is another area where they have joined exceptional expertise to personal interests. They are not people who do things by halves. Roddy’s grandfather had raised Percherons, but the breed had almost disappeared in the United States after 1945. Early in their marriage, Sally decided that she wanted to breed a Percheron thoroughbred mix that is ideal for hunting and pleasure riding.  From there she moved more heavily into breeding full-blooded Percherons,  Roddy joined her in the project, and over the last quarter century they have raised more than a hundred head. They sold their finest stallion to the government of France, where it became the official “national stallion” used to reinvigorate the bloodlines of the breed there.

The horses have quite naturally inspired one of their collections. Dozens of framed nineteenth-century broadsides advertising Virginia Percheron stallions hang in the hallway beyond the breakfast room. Sally is also partial to paintings that depict famous early stallions or show the breed at work. Portrait of Laet by Edwin Megargee (Fig. 11) is one of the boldest paintings in the collection. Another of Sally’s favorites shows a team of Percherons pulling a brightly painted beer wagon with Manhattan’s East River in the background.

Only one rule governs the Moores’ collecting—that both of them must concur before anything enters or leaves the house. They have owned many pieces for decades, yet willingly sell or trade others, particularly when a better or better documented example surfaces. Doing so not only keeps the collection relevant to their lives but allows it to continue to inspire them.

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