Museum Curator Releases New Book on the Battle of Lake Erie

As a graduate student at Bowling Green State University, Kevin Moore wrote a paper on the War of 1812 in Northwest Ohio.

The western Lake Erie region was an important one in the war, with key battles at Fort Meigs outside of what’s now Toledo, Ohio, and Fort Stephenson, an outpost on the Sandusky River at what’s now Fremont, Ohio.

But the most consequential battle in Ohio in the war took place in the water near South Bass Island. The Battle of Lake Erie on Sept. 10, 1813, was a key victory for American forces led by Commodore Oliver Hazard Perry.

It’s also the topic of “Waves and War,” a short story released as a book and ebook by Moore, now the curator of artifacts at the Rutherford B. Hayes Presidential Library & Museums in Fremont. The story follows Joshua Nelson, a crewman working the carronade, a short-barreled cannon commonly used on ships, on the U.S.S. Lawrence, Perry’s initial flagship.

The Lawrence took heavy damage, and Perry rowed to the brig Niagara under heavy fire, taking command and defeating the formidable British Navy. That is all a matter of historical record. In Moore’s book, Nelson follows Perry from the Lawrence to the Niagara, which initially stayed out of the battle. Moore offers his own theory in the story on why that was.

In addition to writing the story, Moore handled the design of the book, compiling maps and pictures to augment the story, and designing the cover. And he has further plans. “This is going to be my springboard for other fiction I write down the road,” he says. “It’ll be a standalone, but I’m going to be writing more historical fiction.”

Moore is thinking about two other novels. One’s a noirish action adventure set in New Orleans in the 1920s, set outside Storyville, the city’s turn-of-the-century red light district, and involving the Black Hand, a proto-Mafia Italian criminal gang. The other is science fiction, set in Kentucky in the 1950s and 1960s and involving UFOs. It’s a topic on which Moore is well-versed, as the co-author of “Unnatural Ohio,” a book that talks about cryptids, legends and yes, alien encounters.

But as a historian, he sees historical fiction as an entry point for readers.

“I love reading historical fiction,” he says. “At the end of it, I’m intrigued in whatever the period is. I’ll go listen to a podcast about that period or get a book about it and do a deep dive.

“I see historical fiction as kind of a springboard. I think it’s a good way to present history to people in a fun way and an engaging way, and hopefully they want to go and learn more.”

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