Julia A. Moore

Julia Ann Moore was an American poetaster. Like Scotland's William McGonagall, she is best known for writing notoriously bad poetry.

Young Julia grew up on her family's Michigan farm, the eldest of four children. When she was ten, her mother became ill, and Julia assumed many of her mother's responsibilities. Her formal education was thereby limited. In her mid-teens, she started writing poetry and songs, mostly in response to the death of children she knew, but any newspaper account of disaster could inspire her.

At age 17, she married Frederick Franklin Moore, a farmer. Julia ran a small store and, over the years, bore ten children, of whom six survived to adulthood. She continued to write poetry and songs.

Moore's first book of verse, The Sentimental Song Book, was published in 1876 by C. M. Loomis of Grand Rapids, and quickly went into a second printing. A copy ended up in the hands of James F. Ryder, a Cleveland publisher, who republished it under the title The Sweet Singer of Michigan Salutes the Public. Ryder sent out numerous review copies to newspapers across the country, with a cover letter filled with low-key mock praise.

According to some reports, though, her husband was not grateful, but embarrassed. Shamed or not, he moved the family 100 miles north to Manton in 1882. Moore's notoriety was known in Manton, but the locals respected her, and did not cooperate with the occasional reporter trying to revisit the past. They were a successful business couple, he with an orchard and sawmill, she with a store.

Her husband died in 1914. The next year, Julia republished "Sunshine and Shadow" in pamphlet form. She spent much of her widowhood "melancholy", sitting on her porch. She died quietly in 1920. The news of her death was widely reported, sometimes with a light touch.