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- Martha Jane was an early Oklahoma pioneer, participated in the Land Rush, built and operated one of the first hotle/boarding houses in Seminole, Oklahoma, was a major funder of the Seminole Pentecostal Church and in her youth was known as a Pentecostal "Leaper", one who would leap from aisle to aisle, playing a tambourine. People remember her sometimes running out of the old Commercial Hotel to separate her adult male children in street fights. She was less than 5 feet tall and thin. They were all large men. A Pioneer Woman, Martha Jane Brinsfield "Grandma Floyd" Martha Jane Brinsfield was born January 8, 1866, in Izzard County, Arkansas, the daughter of Simpson Franklin Brinsfield and Martha Susan (Elvira) Redding. Martha Jane may have been a quarter Choctaw or Creek from her mother, Elvira, who was said to be half Indian. Martha Jane was also a quarter Cherokee from her grandmother on the Brinsfield side, Charity Skipper, who was a full-blood Cherokee. In 1818, Charity was married to a Methodist minister, the Reverend George Washington Brinsfield; six children were born of this marriage in Tennessee. Simpson Franklin Brinsfield was one of these children who came with his father from Tennessee to Izzard County, Arkansas. Martha Jane married Andrew (or John) Reynolds, a farmer, in 1884 at Mountain Home, Izzard County, Arkansas. In early 1887, the family joined a wagon train headed for Oklahoma Indian Territory. They settled in the Econtuchka Bottoms (north of Shawnee), made dugout homes, cleared the land and planted crops. They were share-cropping, and when the crops were laid by, they moved back to Mountain Home Arkansas. In 1889 the Brinsfields and the Reynolds share-cropped on the Arkansas River Bottoms near Fort Smith. In the fall they traveled by wagon back to Oklahoma Indian Territory. This time they settled in Wewoka, the Seminole Indian Capital. In 1889, on April 22, Martha Jane and her father, Simpson, were in Guthrie for the "Land Rush." They drove their open wagon to Guthrie. The land they received was too dry to farm, and after many hardships they returned to Wewoka. Later, they went back to Arkansas, this time to Van Buren. In 1893, when her last son was only three weeks old, they loaded their wagon to return to Oklahoma Indian territory. Martha Jane's husband, Andrew, died on the trip. One version of his death is that after working through a hot day, he ate a watermelon that had been kept cold in a well, and fell dead. A different version is that he died of a local "fever". He was buried on the bank of the Arkansas River, near Fort Smith. Martha Jane, her father, and her four small children continued their journey, and with her father's help she was able to survive the trip west. They arrived back in Wewoka, made a dugout, and Martha Jane set up a tent for a boarding house. White people were moving to a predominately Indian Wewoka (the capital of the Seminole Indian Nation), and soon there was enough demand for more comfortable shelter that she was able to build a tin and wood boarding house and hotel. Martha Jane married Henry Brannan in 1897, and a son, Simpson, (Uncle Simp), was born to them in 1899. They moved to Tidmore where she again established a boarding house. Henry died and she later married a widower, Andrew Jackson Floyd (Uncle Drew). In 1907, the town of Tidmore moved to the new original townsite of Seminole. Martha Jane bought the land at Main and Oak and on it built the Seminole Hotel. It, too, was a tin and wood structure. Her husband and sons hauled the materials from Ada by dray wagons. A grandson, Andrew Jackson Reynolds, later became an Air Force Colonel, was born in the hotel on August 17, 1917. The original hotel burned in 1925. Immediately, Martha Jane began work to replace it, this time with a two-story red brick building from Main Street to the alley on Oak. Seminole became a "boom town" at about this time, and the buiness was very successful. Martha Jane named the building "The Commercial Hotel". Martha Jane's home was at 400 Highland. She was a charter member of the Pentecostal Holiness Church at the corner of what is now Walnut and Milt Phillips Avenue. Her children were Nancy Ellen, Hugh, John, and Dan Reynolds and Simpson Brannon. Nancy Ellen's husband, Ben Rich, was the first U.S. Marshall in Seminole and is pictured on the mural behind the First National Bank Building. All of Martha Jane's children preceded her in death. Seventeen grandchildren survived her.
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1866 - 1956 (90 years)
