A Family-Owned Hotel on Chincoteague Island

In early 1973, Donald and Martha Leonard put the finishing touches on the most ambitious thing they had ever built: the Refuge Motor Inn, forty rooms tucked between the loblolly pines just across the Assateague Channel from the wildlife refuge.

Martha carried her southern hospitality up from Tuscaloosa, Alabama. Don brought his love of this island, and particularly of the Chincoteague Ponies.

Martha Lou Moore was a professor's daughter who met Don at an Army hospital dance during the war and married him in Tuscaloosa in 1946. At the motel she worked the front desk, made the coffee, hired and trained the staff, and kept the books for the motel and the family's other businesses. Denise and Dawn both started under her in the 1980s and are still here.

Don was the dreamer, the builder, the make-it-happen guy. He was very involved in the design and construction of the motel. If you didn't know any better you'd have taken him for the maintenance man. He kept a pair of work gloves on hand, and most days you'd find him mowing the lawn or tidying up the sidewalks. The story of how the Refuge Motor Inn actually got built is quite a read, and it's in the full version of our family legacy.

He told Martha they would live at the motel for two years and then hire someone to run it. Two years turned into seventeen.

The hotel grew as the years passed. A rooftop deck went in at the top of a spiral staircase, and a platform out over the marsh where the lighthouse stands in the distance. The Rookery gift shop opened, and the Bike Depot on our property, with the closest bike rentals to Assateague. You can also see everything the Inn offers.

Don Leonard bought his first horse when he was twelve. He spent much of his boyhood at Grandpa Beebe's farm (the Beebes are the family in Marguerite Henry's Misty of Chincoteague), and he bought land on the north end to graze his own ponies, the way his ancestors had before him. When he and Martha moved into the motel, he wasn't about to leave them behind. A pasture at the Inn was part of the plan from the start, and the ponies have been here as long as the Inn has. He used to say they were the reason for whatever success he had.

The ponies in that pasture belong to the family's Chincoteague Pony Farm, and they're the reason a lot of guests ask for a second-floor room on the pasture side. They're wild the same way the Assateague herds are: not halter broken, not trained to ride, left to roam. They're used to people, and they'll come right up to the fence to say hello.

Don and Martha retired to the farm in 1990, and the family keeps it still. Hunter and Ayden Leonard, Arthur's sons and the third generation, both ride with the Saltwater Cowboys, the riders who move the wild herds on Assateague, and along with their dad they look after those herds and the Leonard ponies on the farm.

Now and then a wild foal loses its mother, and the family brings it home to the farm to be nursed by one of their own mares. One of them was foal #102.

A lot of people first heard of Chincoteague Ponies through Marguerite Henry's Newbery Honor book, Misty of Chincoteague. In 1957, Don and Martha drove out to Marguerite Henry's home in Illinois and brought the real Misty back to the island, to rejoin Grandpa Beebe's herd and have her foals. A few years later, Don bought that herd. Nearly seventy years on, you can pick up Misty of Chincoteague in the Rookery, watch the film in your room, and then step outside and visit her herd.

See the wild ponies of Assateague  ·  Where did the Chincoteague Ponies come from?