Los Angeles County, CA, Biographies

This file is part of the California Genealogy & History Archives 
http://www.rootsweb.ancestry.com/~cagha/index.htm


IRA MORE
 
Principal of the State Normal School at Los Angeles, was born in Parsonfield, 
York County, Maine, May 20, 1829.  He is of early New England stock, his 
great-grandfather, John More, who lost his life fighting the Indians in the war 
of 1756, being one of the early settlers of Scarboro, Maine.  His grandfather, 
also, John More, was the first settler of Parsonfield, and served in the 
Revolutionary army about Boston from before Bunker Hill until the British were 
driven out; and afterward served in New York.  The young lad Ira was early 
inured to hard work in the flinty New England fields, a training which afterward 
did him excellent service; for both father and mother died before he was twelve, 
and the property left him being soon squandered by incompetent management on the 
part of those having it in charge, he found himself truly in a �parlous state, 
shepherd.�  However, with a courage born of blissful ignorance, not knowing the 
certain dangers and the hard struggle of life, nor the laws of �natural 
selection� and �survival of the fittest,� he faced the situation as well as he 
could, and took up the work which his hands found to do.
            He went to Massachusetts in the early spring of 1847, and graduated 
at the State Normal School at Bridgewater, at Christmas, 1849; afterward taught 
in the same school, and in Hingham, Milton and Newburyport; graduated in the 
scientific department of Yale College in 1855; was elected first assistant of 
the Chicago High School in 1856, and helped to organize that institution, taking 
special charge of the city Normal School which was placed in connection with it. 
 Mindful of his duty to his native place, he returned to his early home for a 
wife, marrying Lucy C. Drew, April 16, 1857. They are still walking the �long 
path� together.  In 1857 Mr. More was elected to the mathematical department of 
the State Normal University at Bloomington, Illinois.  In the summer of 1861 he 
enlisted in the Thirty-third Regiment Illinois Infantry; saw three years of hard 
service, the siege and capture of Vicksburg being one of the campaigns.  
Resigned as Captain of Company G, in the summer of 1864, broken in health by the 
malaria of the Western Louisiana bayous; removing to Minnesota in the spring of 
1865, he was Professor of Mathematics in the University of Minnesota at 
Minneapolis, in 1867-�69.  In the latter year he was elected principal of the 
Minnesota State Normal School at St. Cloud.  Migrated to California in 1875; was 
principal of the San Diego public schools, 1875-�76; taught in the State Normal 
School at San Jose, 1876-�83, since which time he has been principal of the 
State Normal School at Los Angeles.
            Few men still in the work have so long a public-school record.  Of 
the thirty nine years since he began teaching, thirty have been devoted to the 
school-room; and of these, twenty-five years have been given to normal-school 
work.  A frank, outspoken manner, and a fearlessness in putting down factious 
opposition, have sometimes made him enemies, who have, however, usually become 
friends on knowing him better.  He is growing old in the comfortable belief that 
the world is growing better, and that the position and treatment a man receives 
in this life, are on the average, as good as he deserves.
 
An Illustrated History of Southern California:  Embracing the Counties of San 
Diego, San Bernardino, Los Angeles and Orange, and the Penninsula of Lower 
California, from the Earliest Period of Occupancy to the Present Time.... - 
Chicago:  The Lewis Publishing Company, 1890.
p. 775-776
Transcribed by Kathy Sedler