Reviews
Read from the Salem's West Side Newspaper NEW!
An old farmhouse still stands near Toledo, Oregon
Murray Loop:
By Ted W. Cox
Old World Publications, 2009
Paperback, 480 pages, $19.95
Foreword by Richard G. Mitchell, Jr.
An old farmhouse still stands near Toledo, Oregon, on a section of 1911 road...
Named for the family that lived off the surrounding farmland, this road is known as Murray Loop. Here, in this beautiful region where the forest meets the sea, the Murray family summoned all the strength and creativity at its disposal to meet the challenge of survival.
Ted W. Cox's detailed, lively account of the family's history recaptures a time when people in western Oregon used every resource at hand to forge a livelihood for themselves and their children. Some readers will look to the book to the book for a wistful glance at a simpler life, on in which people lived by selling garden produce, milk, wool, and timber. Others will value it as a compelling family portrait illuminating a larger American story: the movement of Europeans across the Atlantic and westward in the relentless quest for a better life.
Carefully researched and document using letters and diaries, and containing many photos and maps, Murray Loop threads together a century in a family's life a s it makes the five thousand-mile journey from Scotland to Oregon's Coast Range. There are surprising detour along the way, with stops, for example, in Midwestern communities that embraced radicalism, free thought, free love, and the Underground Railroad. Ultimately, the Murray family settles in what is now Lincoln County, Oregon, and grows with the town it has embraced. In Murray Loop, we find ourselves intimately drawn into their daily lives, their struggles, and their triumphs.
Read this book. Listen to the fierce intelligence of a modest man telling a compelling tale of American growing up.
The book can also be ordered from the author at <www.oldworldpublications.com>.
From the Salem's West Side Newspaper:
Oregon author Ted W. Cox, I suspect, has long had a personal interest in the family of his new book Murray Loop. If not as an intimate family friend, then certainly as an intimate friend of the history of Lincoln County and in particular its town of Toledo, Oregon. For Cox narrates the story of the Murray clan from its origins in the northern Scottish Highlands to the town in the Central Oregon Coast Range in a way a dissident family member might.
Tough love!
Murray Loop is an absorving story of a family displaced as feudal tenant farmers who in desperation leave Scotland seeking a better life on the American continent. Thus begins a trail of hopscotch from their ancestral home to Canada to the United States and ultimately to Oregon. And along the way there is the blending through marriages that in due course make Minnie and Hugh Murray and their three children the principal characters in Ted W. Cox's tale.
The book is a history lesson, too, beyond chronicling the Murrays, in that Cox intertwines his detailed researched of each area --its people, mores, laws, attitudes -- wherever the Murrays settle. That of course is a fine way of forewarning the reader of how family members are affected by their surroundings.
Examples of Cox's extensive research include description of what caused the elimination of the highlands feudal system; and that the migration of so many of the displaced farmers to Canada has today resulted in "more descendants of Northern Scotland living in Canada that in Scotland." Add to that tha free love movement of the 1850s which advocated long-term monogamous relationships, a far cry from what we all know about that latter day free love of the 1960s. One of those early free love centers, Cox writes, played an important role in the Underground Railroad helping runaway slaves.
Another key historical element pertaining to the region in which the Murrays finally settle for good is reported in a crystal clear description; that of the conflict between the Territorial Act of 1848 which acknowledged Indian possession of land, and the Donation Land Act 1850 which opened the land to settlement by whites.
Says Cox, the Federal policy of racial separation made it so "Native Americans, like Highlanders of Scotland, paid a brutally high price." In short, while Murray Loop is a chronicle of a family of "strong-willed, independent people," leading one to wonder how so many such people could live together under one roof, it is also a notable account of some of America's growing pains, warts and all.
The Murray farmhouse still stands at Toledo, Oregon on a section of a 1911 hard surface road ( long since paved ), a loop called . . . Murray.