Eugene author Janet Fisher announces the launch of her first book,  A Place of Her Own: The Legacy of Oregon Pioneer Martha Poindexter Maupin.

Event details: Elkton, Oregon, at the ECEC library Sunday, 1 June,  at 1:00 pm

Future events include a reading at Tsunami Books, Saturday, 21 June, 5:00-7:00 pm

For more information, go to:  http://janetfishernovels.com/

After leaving home at a young age and defying her parents to marry the dashing Garrett Maupin, Martha Maupin’s future became bound up with some of the most extraordinary events in antebellum American history, eventually leading to her journey to a new life on the Oregon Trail.  After Garrett Maupin  died in 1866, leaving her alone on the frontier with their many children, Martha Maupin was torn between grief and relief after a difficult marriage. Lone mothers had few options in her day, but she took charge of her own dream and bought her own place, which is now one of the few Century Farms in Oregon named for a woman.

A Place of Her Own is the story of the author’s great-great-grandmother’s daring decision to buy that  farm on the Oregon frontier after the death of her husband–and story of the author’s own decision to keep that farm in the family. Janet Fisher’s journey into the past to uncover her own family history as she worked to keep the property interweaves with the tales from her ancestors’ lives during the years leading up to the Mexican-American War in the East and her great-great-grandmother’s harrowing journey across the Oregon Trail with her young family and finally tells the tale of Martha’s courageous decision to strike out on her own in Oregon. This book will hold special appeal for Oregon Trail buffs and the many people in this country whose ancestors took that terrible trek, as well as others interested in American history of that period.

Janet Fisher grew up on the farm her great-great grandmother Martha bought almost 150 years ago. After earning a master’s in journalism with honors from the University of Oregon, she taught college writing and wrote freelance for newspapers. She lived and worked in San Francisco, Kalispell, Montana, and other places, including several cities in Oregon, showing a trace of the Maupin wanderlust. Two of her historical novels were Pacific Northwest Writers Association contest finalists. She recently returned to Martha’s farm along the Umpqua River in southern Oregon and became the second woman to own and operate this family treasure.