Horatio Moses was a skilled tinsmith who owned and operated a copper and brass shop where he specialized in working in tin, copper, brass and sheet iron, and fabricated stacks and other products for the Rogers Locomotive Works. He managed the business for 59 years. The brick building was large, three stories and 80 feet long by 20 feet wide, and was set up in part as a machine shop would be. He was well-known in the area for his distinctive sign, a tin dog holding a copper kettle in its mount, that hung outside his shop on lower Van Houten Street. This unique artifact is in the collection of the Passaic County Historical Society.
Moses became a prominent figure in Paterson in the early to mid-nineteenth century. He was a pillar of the First Methodist Episcopal Church coined as “the Father of Methodism,” a founding member of the Passaic County Bible Society (1846) and was known to assist the church recover from financial troubles with his own funds. By 1905 Moses had left Paterson and resided near the San Francisco Bay area in California.
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