The Moorehead house was built in 1810 by Thomas Moorhead, who settled Moorheadville, a small community located on Buffalo road, ten and one-half miles from Erie, and four and one-half miles from North East. Not properly a village, it remains a cluster of neighborly farm residences since the 19th century. The locality received its name from the large number of Moorheads, whose settled and continue to live in the area. Thomas Moorhead, born in Allegheny County, Pennsylvania, was the first Moorhead to settled in the area in 1800, he was soon followed by others of the family.
One of the earliest was George Moorhead who came to Erie County in 1800, he purchased 150 acres of land from the government before settling in the area. Colonel James M. Moorhead — Thomas Moorhead’s brother — came to Erie sometime after 1812, after serving in the US Navy under Admiral Oliver Hazard Perry in
The Battle of Lake Erie during the War of 1812. The first Sabbath school held in Erie County was established in 1817, at Moorheadville, by Colonel Moorhead and Reverend Morton, in a log schoolhouse, which was removed in 1857 for reasons unknown. Thomas Moorhead was one of the founders of the Presbyterian church of North East, which was built in 1805.
Though the Moorhead family was an educated and religious family they engaged in the practice of employing an indenture servant, which wasn't uncommon in Erie county during the 19th century. Different from the slavery practiced in the South, indenture servitude, which was commonly referred to as a domestic service, was a contractual agreement between the servant and the employer, and/or master, with the promise of emancipation once the terms of the agreement were fulfilled.
Before moving to Erie county from Lancaster, the Moorhead family employed a domestic servant whom they brought with them when they arrived. She was a black woman known as Phoebe, she had a son named, Caesar Augustus, who was born in 1790. Caesar came to Erie along with his mother when the Moorheads migrated. Many people in the community remembered Phoebe, who continued until her death to fill the place of a house servant in the Moorhead household — the Moorhead family was well known to have been very good to Phoebe, making her part of their family. Her son, Caesar, became a notable character, not only in Moorheadville, but in Erie as well. He married an Erie woman of his own race and continued with the Moorheads, whom he regarded as his own people, even after he became free by the operation of the law, continuing to remain on their farm. The Moorheads gave him a piece of ground, four acres in extent, with a small house, and stocked it with a cow and other animals, and there he lived until his death at about the age of eighty.
The Moorhead family has survived over the last two centuries, while facing tremendous challenges to keep their farm going for so long; through the Great Depression in the 1930s and a failing market in the 1970s that left area farmers struggling to make ends meet, all the while members of the family building farms in the area, totaling somewhere about 1,000 acres. Douglas Moorhead started farming his 170-acre grape farm in 1956, that he inherit from his father, then started his own winemaking business, Presque Isle Wine Cellars, in 1964.
In the past, the Moorhead family had to contend with the effects of Prohibition — the national ban on alcohol production, consumption and transportation that was in place from 1920 to 1933. As early as the mid-1930s Douglas' father wanted to make wine from his grapes. Prohibition had been repealed by that time, but many Pennsylvania legislators weren't accepting of the idea local farmers could produce alcohol. Finally, after months of pressuring the Legislature to pass a law licensing farms as wineries, the Moorhead family were finally successful in 1968. They were one of two farms to be licensed in Pennsylvania at the time.
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| Moorhead House (December 29, 1934) |
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| Moorhead House (December 29, 1934) |
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| Moorhead House (December 29, 1934) |