ATHOLL HIGHLANDERS TO VISIT USA
The Murray Clan Society
Added on 24 August 2024
The Atholl Highlanders have marched in Athol (Massachusetts) twice and will be going back in April 2025 to celebrate Athol’s famed River Rat parade, along with travelling to perform in New York City (Tartan Week) and Washington, D.C. The Massachusetts town is named after the village in Scotland called Blair Atholl (two lls is Scottish Atholl, and one l is the Massachusetts Athol). The 9-acre Hercules Garden at Blair Castle, which dates back to the 18th-century, was being laid out at the same time that Athol, Mass., was being named. Before British settlers arrived in North America, the Nipmuc Nation Tribe already had a name for the region: Pequoiag. However, when the town was incorporated in 1762, John Murray, a politician and native of Blair Atholl, chose the name Athol because the rolling hills reminded him of his Scottish hometown. Murray was reported to be a distant cousin of the Duke of Atholl. Murray was given the paperwork to register the town’s name as Paxton, not Athol, but took it upon himself to change it because he was supposedly a slippery, duplicitous miscreant. Another town in Worcester County got the name Paxton.
“He was a scoundrel,” said state Representative Susannah Whipps, an independent from Athol whose family has lived in the town for seven generations. “John Murray was a loyalist, and he got chased out of Massachusetts because he sided with the British during the Revolutionary War.” When news of Murray’s disloyalty to the Colonies and continued love of the Crown became known, a mob of hundreds gathered at his home. According to records in the Loyalist Collection at the University of New Brunswick in Fredericton, he fled to Boston. All of his property was seized, and he was banished to Canada. In 1780, the Massachusetts General Assembly denounced him as a traitor. “He was a shyster, a real shady character", Whipps said. Murray’s face appears on Athol’s official town seal. A traitor who could be best described as “odious” is Athol’s founding father. That is one way to look at it, but we prefer to think of Athol and its direct connection to the beauty of Scotland.