His family was traumatised "by the persecution Quakers suffered for their neutral stand during the American Revolution," [2] and they soon moved to a Loyalist refugee camp in New York City.
His family had deep roots there, an ancestor, Samuel Moore having held many offices in the early colony of East Jersey right after it had been settled in the 1660s.
In 1811, James Brown[4] drove a team to take Moore, his wife and five children,[5] from Elizabethtown, New Jersey, to the County of Norfolk, in Upper Canada.
While living in Norwich, Elias assisted Peter Lossing to assemble details for Gourlay's Statistical Account of Upper Canada, which was published in 1822.
[7] Similarly, the first temperance lecture in the Yarmouth district is said to have been given in Moore's home by David Burgess, a neighbour, and founder of the Methodist congregation at Union, Ontario.
[8] Moore was instrumental in building the first meeting house of the Yarmouth Friends, and sat on the committee charged with establishing a school in the community.
[9] In 1834, Moore and Thomas Parke, a Wesleyan Methodist from London, won the two seats in the Middlesex riding for the Reformers in the 12th Parliament of Upper Canada.
Moore's granddaughter, Isabella Sprague, married Thomas Scatcherd, who sat in the Province of Canada Legislative Assembly for West Middlesex, beginning in 1861.