William J. Moore

William J. Moore was an early 20th-century farrier whose best-known work, Balancing and Shoeing Trotting and Pacing Horses, was published in 1916. In the book’s introduction, he is described as being born in Richmond, Virginia, in 1865 and as having spent his life in the business of horse shoeing.

Moore worked at Allen Farm in Pittsfield, Massachusetts, where he had charge of the horse shoeing department for more than twenty years by the time the book appeared. He began as an apprentice at age sixteen and, according to the contemporary introduction, had made horse shoeing his sole occupation ever since.

What makes Moore interesting as an author is the hands-on nature of his writing. He presents himself not as a distant theorist but as a working specialist who had shod many notable trotting and pacing horses, and his book is aimed at helping readers solve real gait and hoof-care problems in plain, everyday language.