lorene evans moffett
1922-2010
Life Story
Early Life in Newton County
Lorene Evans Moffett was born on June 9, 1922, in Mississippi, the daughter of Sam Evans and Lillian Evans. She grew up in a large African American farming family in Newton County, where agriculture, family labor, and rural community life shaped much of her childhood.
Lorene was one of eleven children born to Sam and Lillian Evans. Her siblings included Mattie, Ed, Ovetta (Oneta), Annie, Frenelle (Freenell), Sophia, Irma, Willie, Sam Jr., and Johnny Evans.
The 1930 United States Census recorded eight-year-old Lorene living with her parents and siblings in Beat 4 of Newton County, Mississippi. Like the other school-age children in the household, she was attending school.
Ten years later, Lorene remained in her parents’ Newton County household. At eighteen, she had completed the first year of high school, giving her more formal schooling than some members of the generation before her.
Marriage and a New Life in Smith County
By the 1940s, Lorene had married Leo Moffett and moved from Newton County to neighboring Smith County, Mississippi. There, the couple established their household in the rural Taylorsville area and began raising a family.
Their children included Leo Moffett Jr., Johnnie M. Moffett, Laura M. Moffett, Marvin Moffett, and Margaret Moffett.
The surviving records also reveal that Lorene and Leo’s marriage passed through a difficult period near the end of the 1940s.
On November 8, 1949, the Hattiesburg American reported that a chancery court had ordered Cleo Moffett to pay Lorene Moffett $8 per week for the support of their minor children. The name “Cleo” appears in subsequent court notices and apparently refers to Lorene’s husband, Leo Moffett.
Several months later, on March 25, 1950, Lorene filed a bill for divorce in the case Lorene Moffett v. Cleo Moffett. The proceeding did not result in a divorce. On April 14, 1950, the court dismissed the bill for divorce with prejudice.
The timing of these proceedings makes the 1950 census particularly revealing. Despite the recent court action, Lorene and Leo were enumerated together as husband and wife later that year.
Twenty-seven-year-old Lorene was living with 32-year-old Leo and their children on a farm along Otho Jones Road in Smith County. Also living in the household was Lorene’s younger sister, Sophie Evans, then nineteen years old.
The census therefore captures a family that had experienced documented marital difficulties but remained together following the dismissal of the divorce action.
The Loss of a Son
One of the most devastating documented events in Lorene’s life occurred on September 17, 1966, when her twenty-year-old son, Leo Moffett Jr., was killed in Tennessee.
Leo Jr. was a member of the Job Corps, the federal program established during the 1960s to provide young people with education, vocational training, and work opportunities. On the night before the accident, a group of Job Corpsmen had attended a fair in East Tennessee. They were traveling by bus back to their camp in Kentucky when tragedy struck.
Near Tazewell, Tennessee, their bus collided with a trailer truck early Saturday morning. The collision killed five of the young Job Corpsmen. Among the dead was Leo Moffett Jr., age twenty, of Taylorsville, Mississippi.⁷
The official Tennessee death record confirms that Leo Moffett Jr. died on September 17, 1966, in Tazewell, Claiborne County, Tennessee. His death certificate identified his father as Leo Moffett and his mother by her maiden name, Lorene Evans, providing direct documentary confirmation of the parent-child relationship. The record gives Leo Jr.’s birth date as April 27, 1946, in Mississippi.⁸
For Lorene and her family, the accident meant the sudden loss of a son who had only recently entered adulthood. He was one of five young men whose lives ended together that September morning while returning to their Job Corps camp.
Leo Jr.’s body was returned to Mississippi, and he was buried at Cherry Grove Missionary Baptist Church Cemetery in the Taylorsville area.⁹
Later Years in Taylorsville
Lorene remained closely associated with the Taylorsville community of Smith County during her later years. Records placed her on Route 3 in Taylorsville, the rural community where she and Leo had raised their family.
Her children’s later residences also reveal both continuity and migration within the family. Several remained near their mother in Taylorsville, while her daughter Margaret Moffett Lott eventually made her home thousands of miles away in Tacoma, Washington.
By the end of Lorene’s life, she had lived through nearly nine decades of enormous change. Born into a rural Mississippi farming family in 1922, she came of age during the Depression, raised children during the mid-twentieth century, endured marital difficulties documented in the public record, and suffered the death of a young son before living long enough to see later generations of her family grow into adulthood.
Death and Legacy
Lorene Evans Moffett died on February 10, 2010, at Magee General Hospital in Magee, Mississippi. She was eighty-seven years old.
Her funeral was held on Tuesday, February 16, 2010, at Cherry Grove Missionary Baptist Church in Taylorsville, with arrangements entrusted to Young’s Funeral Home.
She was laid to rest in Cherry Grove Missionary Baptist Church Cemetery, the same cemetery where her son Leo Jr. had been buried following his tragic death in 1966.
At the time of Lorene’s death, four of her children survived her: Laura Brown, Johnnie Brown, and Marvin Moffett of Taylorsville, Mississippi, and Margaret Lott of Tacoma, Washington. She also left behind extended family and descendants who carried forward a family story that had begun decades earlier in the farming communities of Newton County.
Lorene’s eighty-seven years connected two rural Mississippi communities and several generations of the Evans and Moffett families. Her story is preserved not through a single extraordinary public achievement, but through the records of an ordinary life that endured change, hardship, family separation, reconciliation, devastating loss, and longevity. From her childhood in Sam and Lillian Evans’s Newton County household to her final resting place beside her son in Smith County, Lorene’s life forms another link in the larger history of the Evans family of east-central Mississippi.
Resting Place
Cherry Grove Missionary Baptist Church Cemetery
Photos/Albums
Sources
- 1930 United States Federal Census, Newton County, Mississippi, Beat 4, household of Sam Evans, including Lorene Evans, age 8; digital image, Ancestry.com.
- 1940 United States Federal Census, Newton County, Mississippi, household of Sam Evans, including Lorene Evans, age 18; digital image, Ancestry.com.
- Hattiesburg American (Hattiesburg, Mississippi), November 8, 1949, 7.
- Hattiesburg American (Hattiesburg, Mississippi), March 25, 1950, 10. Hattiesburg American (Hattiesburg, Mississippi), April 14, 1950, 14.
- 1950 United States Federal Census, Smith County, Mississippi, Otho Jones Road, household of Leo Moffett, including Lorene Moffett and Sophie Evans; digital image, Ancestry.com.
- Associated Press, “Bus-Truck Crash Kills 5,” The Commercial Appeal (Memphis, Tennessee), September 18, 1966, 31.
- Tennessee Department of Health, death certificate no. 25026, Leo Moffett Jr., September 17, 1966, Tazewell, Claiborne County, Tennessee; digital image, Ancestry.com.
- Burial information for Leo Moffett Jr., Cherry Grove Missionary Baptist Church Cemetery, Taylorsville, Smith County, Mississippi.
- “Lorene Evans Moffett,” Hattiesburg American (Hattiesburg, Mississippi), February 13, 2010, 4.
- Ibid.
- Ibid.
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