Jody Murtagh, Jr., ex-MFH
What Is a Penn-Marydel?
Born to Be Master of a Dying Sport by Joseph T. Murtagh, Jr., ex-MFH, 2016, 287 pages, illustrated, $45.00 plus $5.00 shipping. Purchase direct from author by clicking on this email address: [email protected]. Inscribed, signed copies may be requested.What follows is an excerpt from Jody Murtagh’s new memoir, Born to Be Master of a Dying Sport. The book tells the unvarnished story of the ups and downs of a man trying gallantly to keep his hunt and his heritage going in a changing world and his love for the Penn-Marydel foxhound, a breed formally established by his maternal grandparents.
A Penn-Marydel is a true American hound that was a derivative of hounds that came to America from England and France in the early 1600s with the settlers of the time. These settlers came to what we now call the Eastern Shore regions. One such family with which I am very familiar—the Jackson Family—settled around 1682 in the Maryland family seat, Jackson’s Choice, a three hundred-acre tract on the Eastern Bay shore opposite Lower Kent Island, patented to Richard Jackson by Lord Baltimore in 1664.
