[1] His mother died when he was quite young, and while his father remarried and became head of a Presbyterian seminary in Xenia, Ohio,[1] his travels for keeping that institution open left young Warren and his sister in the care of two aunts, who are recalled vividly in Helen Hooven Santmyer's non-fictional "Ohio Town" and the novel "And Ladies of the Club."

[1] Excavations and collections begun as a schoolboy continued through self-financed work taking him to a display of his own at the 1888 Cincinnati Centennial Exposition, and contact with Dr. Thomas Wilson of the Smithsonian Institution.

Dr. Wilson encouraged and possibly helped Moorehead to enter the University of Pennsylvania for study under the famous Dr. Edward Drinker Cope, but opportunities to lecture and write for publication led Warren away from class work.

A contract to write for a national magazine about the "Ghost Dance" phenomenon on the Pine Ridge Indian Reservation put Moorehead on the scene for the critical weeks leading up to what is now known as the Wounded Knee Massacre of Dec. 29, 1890.

After a frustrating period trying to influence legislators to give justice to the Sioux and publish his account of events leading up to the massacre, Moorehead returned to Ohio and found a position developing the state display for the 1893 World's Columbian Exposition (Chicago World's Fair), which led him to work with Frederic Ward Putnam, the Harvard professor who began the academic field of archaeology in the United States.

[8][10] Efforts to have Fort Ancient purchased and cared for by the state were spurred by Moorehead's publications on that site[11] and other Ohio cultural marvels.

With the aunts refusing to release any money for "that dirty work," Moorehead launched into an ambitious plan to create an atlas of Ohio mounds and earthworks, which he saw eroding and destroyed wherever he went across the Midwest, and even in forays into the American southwest, becoming one of the first surveyors of Chaco Canyon and Mesa Verde.

Tuberculosis was nearly always fatal in Moorehead's day, and when he was clearly diagnosed with the disease, a second trip to the desert southwest became part of what turned into a permanent leave from OAHS after 1898.

Peabody, seeing how ill Moorehead had become, generously offered a season of treatment at Saranac Lake, New York, the famous tuberculosis sanitarium where just a few years earlier Robert Louis Stevenson had sought relief.

He and Evelyn had a second son, Singleton Peabody Moorehead, who would become a key architect with the Colonial Williamsburg Foundation and is buried on the grounds of Bruton Parish Church there.

In 1923, the fledgling Central Section of the American Anthropological Association sent him a rebuke concerning a flyer he had distributed which had laid out a manner in which collectors of artifacts could cooperate with him or other archaeologists.

With many honors and published volumes to his credit, and a thriving and vital field of research and informed speculation well established, Moorehead died in 1939 and was buried near his parents, grandfather, and aunts in Xenia.

The family home is now the heart of the Greene County Historical Society; where portraits of his father William and grandfather Joseph are on prominent display.

What is often overlooked is that in the narrative, Moorehead would encounter mounds already being taken down by county road crews and construction laborers, and would negotiate to allow an interval of investigation in the middle of the demolition before the project was completed.

He believed that collection of artifacts was not necessarily a bad thing, and promoted good relations between professional archaeologists and collectors to the end of his life.