Marinda Branson Moore (December 16, 1829 - June 27, 1864) was a North Carolina educator and writer of textbooks. Moore was born in Randolph County, North Carolina. She was the first wife of businessman Enoch William Moore (1868 - 1952), who ran a mill complex, Moore's Mill, in Belews Creek, NC. In 1855, she founded the Margarita Seminary, named after Margarita Nixon, a missionary to China. While always a religious and political conservative, as tensions over slavery and states' rights peaked in the leadup to the American Civil War (1861 - 1865), Moore's attitudes became increasingly polarized. She was not alone in her belief that textbooks and other educational materials, most of which were published in New England, were antithetical to the political, moral, and social values of southern states. She began writing and printing her own textbooks, which she called 'Dixie Readers', which were published during the Civil War by Branson and Farrar in Raleigh, North Carolina. The most prominent of these was her Primary Geography, which although deplorably racist by modern standards, is unique reflects the ethos of Southern values at the height of the war. The work was popular enough to have gone through two editions. She died in 1864, before the end of the Civil War.