Quaker School Founder, Woodworker S. Brook Moore

S. Brook Moore, 90, founder of Sandy Spring Friends School and a woodworker, died of respiratory failure July 1 at his home in Sandy Spring.

He opened the Quaker school in 1961 with 77 students and nine full-time faculty members housed in three buildings. He remained a presence at the school as it grew to the current enrollment of 550, with more than 100 faculty members and support staffers, and added two buildings on the 140-acre campus.

Mr. Moore was inspired to start the school after serving on the board of George School in Newtown, Pa., a Quaker boarding school where he attended high school. After one board meeting in the late 1950s, Mr. Moore rose to speak in a business meeting of the Sandy Spring Society of Friends. He proposed that the community start a new school to serve the children of the Friends and others who sought a Friends education.

Reaction was mixed, according to the story that is often told at school gatherings, but the day after his proposal, Mr. Moore received a $100 donation, and he felt sufficiently supported to form a committee.

Esther Scott, who lived across the road from the Moore family's orchard, donated the first of several parcels of acreage from her family farm for the school and a center. The center was incorporated in 1959, and the school opened in 1961, primarily as a boarding school for students in grades 10 and 11.

Mr. Moore never taught at the school, but he often dropped by to eat with the students or appeared for ceremonial functions, said Ken Smith, the school's current leader. He and his wife, who was the school's dietitian and later head of alumni relations, kept in close touch with the two generations of students and employees who were part of the school.

Mr. Moore was born on his family farm, across the road from what would become the site of the school. He learned cabinetry in high school, and it became his life's work.

After a stint as an inspector in a wooden airplane factory during World War II, Mr. Moore returned to the homestead -- the fifth generation of his family to live there -- and began hand-crafting furniture, building a reputation for elegantly simple design and solid construction. He also became the leading regional repairman for the wings of Piper Cubs, the dominant small airplane of the time. He built ultralights, too, and flew one for several years until it crashed.

A Ford tractor kit that he developed during his teens is in the permanent collection of the Sandy Spring Museum. Mr. Moore also restored two old panel trucks that he displayed at car shows and local festivals.

Musical instruments were another fascination, and in his later years, he made hammer and plucked dulcimers, harps and viola de gambas. The sign on the road outside his house during that time read: "S.B. Moore, Instrument Maker."

He worked until two years ago.

His wife of 66 years, Mary Lillian Murphey Moore, died in 2005.

Survivors include three children, Florence Moore Grasso of East Hardwick, Vt., J. Lewis Moore of Sandy Spring and S. Brook Moore II of Halfway, Ore.; and two grandchildren.