Annie Oakley - Early Life

Early Life

Phoebe Ann (Annie) Moses was born in "a cabin less than two miles northwest of Willowdell in Partentown North Star, Ohio", a rural western border county of Ohio. Her birthplace log cabin site is about five miles eastward of North Star. There is a stone-mounted plaque in the vicinity of the cabin site, which was placed by the Annie Oakley Committee in 1981, 121 years after her birth.

Annie's parents were Quakers of English descent from Hollidaysburg, Blair County, Pennsylvania: Susan Wise, age 18, and Jacob Moses (1860 U.S. Census shows his father's name as Mauzy, born 1799), age 49, married in 1848. A fire burned down their tavern in Hollidaysburg, so they moved to a rented farm (later purchased with a mortgage) in Patterson Township, Darke County. The move occurred sometime between 1855 and her sister Sarah Ellen's Darke County birth in 1857.

Born in 1860, Annie was the sixth of Jacob and Susan's seven children but her mother also had another child named Emily. Her father, who had fought in the War of 1812, died in 1866 at age 65, from pneumonia and overexposure in freezing weather. Her mother married Daniel Brumbaugh, had a ninth child, Emily, and was widowed a second time.

On March 15, 1870, at age nine, Annie was admitted to Darke County Infirmary, along with elder sister Sarah Ellen. According to her autobiography, she was put in the care of the Infirmary's superintendent, Samuel Crawford Edington and his wife Nancy, who taught her to sew and decorate. Beginning in the spring of 1870, she was "bound out" to a local family to help care for their infant son, on the false promise of fifty cents a week and an education. She spent about two years in near-slavery to them where she endured mental and physical abuse. She would often have to do boys' work. One time the wife put Annie out in the freezing cold, without shoes, as a punishment because she had fallen asleep over some darning. Annie referred to them as "the wolves". Even in her autobiography, she kindly never told the couple's real name. When, in the spring of 1872, she reunited with her family, her mother had married a third time, to Joseph Shaw.

Because of poverty following the death of her father, Annie did not regularly attend school. But later, she did receive some additional education. She rendered her surname as ending in "ee", while it appears as "Moses" on her father's gravestone and in his military record; it is the official spelling by the Annie Oakley Foundation maintained by her living relatives. Variations in the accepted surname spelling ("Moses") have included "Mosey", "Mosie", and "Mauzy". There is no known record to substantiate Annie's vehement assertion that the correct spelling is "Mozee".

Annie began trapping at a young age, and shooting and hunting by age eight to support her siblings and her widowed mother. She sold the hunted game for money to locals in Greenville, as well as restaurants and hotels in southern Ohio. Her skill eventually paid off the mortgage on her mother's farm when Annie was 15.