Stone Gardens: A wealthy transplanted plantation owner fathered a longtime postmistress of Mayes County
Joseph Lynch Martin took the nickname Greenbrier from the plantation he built near present-day Strang after the Cherokee removal, and that same place later gave its name to the rural post office where his daughter Willie Penn Adair Martin served as postmaster from July 1906 to April 1910.
Born August 20, 1820, in the Cherokee Nation East in Georgia, Joseph was the son of Judge John Calvin Martin, the first Chief Justice and first Treasurer of the Cherokee Nation, and Eleanor McDaniel. The family endured removal and resettled in Indian Territory, where Joseph established a large estate worked by more than a hundred enslaved people and raised children across several marriages.
He served as a cavalry officer in a Cherokee regiment of the Confederate Army under Brigadier General Stand Watie during the Civil War.
His wives included Sabra C. Garrett Clark, Julia Lombard, Sallie Childress, Betsy Maw, and Lucy Brown Rogers, and with them he fathered children such as Alexander Lombard, Polisha, Cicero H., Martha Washington, Richard Lewis, Anne Charlotte, Susie Emory, Joanna Conseen, John Rogers, Ruth E., Hernando Desoto, and Victoria Rogers Martin.
In 1870 he married Nancy Jane “Jennie” Harlin, and their children included Jessie B. Crittenden, Granville Augustus “Cunnie” Martin, and Willie Penn Adair Martin.
Willie, born August 1, 1879, at Greenbrier, belonged to the Deer Clan and was educated in local schools and at the Female Seminary. As a young woman she took charge of the Greenbrier post office in the years before statehood, handling the mail for the scattered farms of the community until 1910.
The office itself was discontinued in 1914 with its remaining business sent to Adair. She was already the mother of Mary Virginia, born in 1910, and Cherokee Adair, born in 1912, when she married Ned Adair Cochran at Pryor on July 24, 1915. Ned, the son of Richard and Mary Cochran, had been born August 20, 1880, and educated at the Orphan Asylum.
Their later children were Joseph Martin, born in 1915, and Robert Edward, born in 1917. The couple’s markers in the family burial ground still carry the inscriptions Mama and Daddy.
Joseph Lynch Martin died on November 9, 1891, at the age of seventy-one and was buried in the Ross Mayes Cemetery near Salina in Mayes County, a large historic ground long associated with prominent Cherokee families.
Willie outlived him by more than six decades. After Ned’s death on March 29, 1944, she lived on until May 1, 1957, when she died in Rogers County at the age of seventy-seven.
She was laid to rest beside her husband in the small Cochran Cemetery in Mayes County, a fenced family plot roughly three-quarters of a mile southeast of the Coats Cemetery and listed as plot 1 on Tyner’s map of old burial places of the former Cherokee Nation.
Her mother Jennie also rests there, along with several members of the Rogers family.
Together the two cemeteries hold the father who built Greenbrier and the daughter who kept its post office, linking the generations that crossed from the old Cherokee Nation into the early decades of Oklahoma statehood.
