Tabitha Moffatt Brown

Tabitha Moffatt Brown was an American pioneer and educator who travelled to Oregon in 1846 when she was in her mid-sixties. A widowed New Englander with limited means, she survived a difficult overland journey and settled in the Tualatin Plains near present-day Forest Grove.

Brown helped organise a home and school for children left orphaned or destitute during the migrations of the late 1840s. That institution developed into Tualatin Academy, chartered by the Oregon Territorial Legislature in 1849 and later associated with Pacific University, and Brown became widely remembered as the “Mother of Oregon”.

Jane Kirkpatrick’s This Road We Traveled makes the sixty-six-year-old Tabitha Moffatt Brown a protagonist rather than a peripheral pioneer figure. Refusing to remain behind when her family heads for Oregon, Tabitha hires her own wagon and survives separation, hunger and the hazards of the trail. The novel then connects that endurance to her later vocation among vulnerable migrant children, presenting the woman remembered as the ‘Mother of Oregon’ as someone whose public usefulness emerged from a journey undertaken late in life.