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Murray preached the Adirondack gospel

W.H.H. Murray, circa 1875 (Provided photo — New York Public Library)

One can’t delve long into Adirondack history without coming across the name William Henry Harrison Murray. His career in the ministry became well known during the mid to late 19th century, as did his love of the northern New York mountain region. Murray’s book “Adventures in the Wilderness” was the lure that first brought many to the North Country.

A biography, “A Passionate Life: W.H.H. Murray, from Preacher to Progressive,” by Randall Beach, offers a fair amount of new perspective on the man. It well reveals the contradictions as well as the enthusiasms in his life.

Murray’s first passions were for his ministry. He became established in Meriden, Connecticut, before his calling in 1869 to Boston’s prestigious Park Street Church. At first a fairly orthodox doctrinaire, he became more engaged in social reform, with increasing attention to society’s poor and ardent support for temperance movements.

The contradictions in his life began almost immediately, albeit with well rationalized explanation. He believed in the need for nurturing the physical as well as the spiritual aspects of life, and for this the Adirondacks became important. Trips to Long Lake and Raquette Lake became routine during his summer breaks. He began writing about those exploits, feeling that written expression would help sharpen his oratory and enhance his value as a clergyman.

“Adventures in the Wilderness” appeared in 1869 and made him a nationally known figure. Handsome offers for public talks helped him make his case for strenuous vacation pursuits. There were other side interests, such as horse breeding. He wrote a book on this, too, “The Perfect Horse.” Along the way he lost support from his church, ultimately leaving Park Street to preach independently in the Boston Music Hall. He seemed almost manic in his expectations for building a large metropolitan congregation; one begins to speculate whether if around today he’d be working to build a television ministry.

This angling image appears in “Adventures in the wilderness, or, Camp-life in the Adirondacks” (1869) by W.H.H. Murray. (Photo provided)

Life became a bit less stable. There were affairs. His marriage dissolved. (His ex-wife Isadora studied medicine and became a surgeon.) He wandered to Texas, San Francisco, Montreal and Burlington, Vermont. Public speaking continued as the mainstay of his income, but he also tried his hand at several businesses, including an unsuccessful venture manufacturing buckboard wagons. Becoming an ardent supporter of women’s rights, he also dabbled with free love movements.

Eventually, Murray remarried and settled down. In fact, when the family homestead in Connecticut that he’d lost during financial reverses came up for sale, he managed to buy back both house and land. His final years were ones of satisfying and peaceful life with his family, which came to include four daughters. During these years, he finished the last of his 20 books, “How I Educated my Daughters.” He died in 1904 in the same room in which he’d been born 64 years earlier.

Those of us who know Murray mainly from his Adirondack books, and from the response by people following his directions to the wilderness who became known as the “Murray rush,” will gain a much fuller sense of the man. That fuller sense is not all positive. I credit the author, who is a direct descendant, and who had access to materials never before available. Whereas I feared a bit of a hagiography about Murray, Beach appears to give a quite balanced portrait of his forebear.

The book’s prose at times becomes cumbersome. There’s an excess of commas and compound sentences, and description is occasionally overdone. Additional editing would have produced a smoother text.

But these are modest complaints. I enjoyed this description of a notable and unusual personality, one who began as an old-school theologian, then worked to meet the needs of a troubled society, before falling into a nomadic decline, and eventually achieving a sort of redemption. His reverence for nature and for the restorative power of wilderness, taken for granted now, was almost revolutionary in his own time. So was his decision to write a how-to guide for visiting the Adirondacks. We all follow a bit in his footsteps.

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