Wickapogue (Genius, Madness, and the Murrays of Southampton)

In the mid-1920s, the author’s great-grandfather, Thomas E. Murray, bought Wickapogue, a large “cottage” on a vast piece of property overlooking the ocean in Southampton, on the south fork of Long Island, New York. TEM was born into near poverty in Albany, New York, in 1860, in a working-class neighborhood of Irish immigrants. He was only nine years old when he had to drop out of school, after his father, older sister, and infant brother all died within five months from a cholera outbreak. The little boy had no choice; it was up to him to support his mother, and he soon lined up three jobs. He built a steam engine from scratch when he was fifteen. By nineteen, he was overseeing the massive engines supplying Albany’s water supply, and in his mid-twenties was an integral part of the effort to introduce electricity and light to his home city.

By the turn of the twentieth century, Grandpa Murray and his family relocated to Brooklyn, where he began working with Thomas Edison, eventually designing and building the first ten power stations that were the foundation of what we now know as Con Edison. At the same time, Grandpa was inventing and innovating, piling up some five hundred patents—the electric fuse box among them—most focused on the safe use of electricity by consumers around the world. All of this memorialized in Murray family lore by a phrase heard countless times over the years: “Thomas Edison may have invented the light bulb, but it was Thomas E. Murray who turned it on.”

But with every family, there’s invariably another story, untold and hidden away. The Murrays are no different, and their story is defined by a clash between darkness and light. The author’s great-grandfather spent his life largely in the pursuit of the light and electrical energy he delivered to the world, with his power stations, inventions, and innovations. But in the decades ahead, a dark, deadly shadow of dysfunction and despair cut a wide swath through three generations of Murray men, destructive, deadly, and lurking beneath the gilded surface of the family compound at Wickapogue, a place of indescribable happiness but also unspeakable tragedy.

That is the story told in Wickapogue: Genius, Madness, and the Murrays of Southampton.