Tova Brickley is a reporter with Community News Service, part of the University of Vermont’s Reporting & Documentary Storytelling program.
If you tell it a certain way, the story behind Murray Hill Farm sounds like a Hallmark Christmas movie.
Jane Murray leaves her successful career as a New York journalist to move to Vermont with her husband to help run their family’s Christmas tree farm in Waterbury. They find happiness and fulfillment in family and small-town life.
Of course, it’s more complicated. The farm is owned by Jane’s father-in-law, Bob Murray, who is an unlikely candidate for Santa Claus. His grandkids call him “Grumpa,” and a customer once compared him to Ebenezer Scrooge.
But behind the Grinchy facade, Bob Murray has always been a dreamer.
“There’s nothing … until you actually start doing something,” Jane Murray said.
For the Murray family, the doing is what matters most. Running the tree farm isn’t very profitable, but it’s united them around a common goal. Situated amid rolling hills, it’s been operating for almost 50 years as a choose-and-cut Christmas tree farm.
It began as a dream.
“I was going to leave town. I was so broke. But my uncle died and left me some money to buy the property,” Bob Murray said. “I had these odd people come out from Vermont’s Agency of Agriculture and they said, ‘Well, you can grow berry crops or Christmas trees.’ Berries are extremely labor intensive. They didn’t tell us that trees are too.”
In 1976, Bob Murray and his wife, Carlie, bought the 60-acre plot of land and planted their first tree. It took them seven or eight more years before they sold one, for only $5.
Now, they have nearly 20,000 trees and customers who come back every year.
Guests arrive to a pile of colorful plastic sleds and a stack of handsaws. What lies ahead is a journey through balsam firs until they find the perfect one. The trek back up the hill to the Murrays’ house is rewarded with hot cocoa and candy canes.
Jane Murray and her husband Rob moved back to Waterbury in 2019. They’re raising their two kids, 4 and 6, in a house they built adjacent to Bob Murray’s, overlooking the fields of trees.
“I’ve only ever lived in cities,” said Jane Murray, who has taken on responsibility for some aspects of the farm. “I really enjoy the social aspects of it all. I just saw 200 people that live in our community, and I love the feeling that everybody you know is coming here.
“When Rob brought me home for the first time, 15 years ago or so, I remember being like, ‘Wow, this is like that Hallmark movie,’” she said. “Now we have our own little family compound.”
Many people know Bob Murray as “Dr. Bob.” He worked as a family medicine physician in Waterbury for 34 years while he and his wife ran the farm. Patients and friends from his practice would frequently visit for their Christmas trees.
Now as he approaches 82, he no longer does much of the most demanding work on the farm. But Bob Murray can still be found on one of his beloved tractors around the property. “I’m a workaholic. I gotta have something to do. I make all the wreaths. I put all the trees together,” he said.
That same work ethic served him well as a doctor, Jane Murray said. “He’s a little rough around the edges, but he was an amazing diagnostician. That’s what you want in a doctor,” she said.
For a Christmas tree farm owner, Bob Murray still may come off as a little bit gruff. Jane Murray recalled an online comment by a guest who visited the farm. “They talked about their experience and the sledding and the cocoa and all these things, then they’re like, ‘And then there’s Dr. Bob, and he’s a bit more Ebenezer than Claus,’” she remembered. “And I was like, ‘That’s it.’ Because he is. But at the end, Ebenezer, he does come around. He cares.”
The Murray Hill Farm is open for the season through Christmas Eve from 9 a.m. to 4 p.m., daily except for Mondays. Because of limited Christmas tree options in the area, the Murrays expect an increase in visitors before the holiday. However, they do not anticipate needing to close early.
