Everyone who's stayed at the Refuge Inn has heard some version of Donald Leonard's story — the boy who couldn't be found unless you looked for the ponies, the dreamer who built an iconic motel with a little luck and a lot of help from his family and friends. It's a good story, and one we hope will define our family's legacy for a long time to come.
But it's only half of the story. The other half belongs to Martha.
Martha Lou Moore grew up the daughter of a professor in Tuscaloosa, Alabama. During World War II, she and her sorority sisters at the University of Alabama went to a dance at the Army hospital one evening to cheer up injured soldiers, never expecting her future husband to be there. Donald was a medic, not a patient, so technically he wasn't supposed to be at the dance at all. But he wasn't the type to let that little detail stop him. He slipped into a supply closet, changed into a hospital gown, and walked into the dance anyway.
As he danced with Martha, she asked about his hometown. He told her, "It's a wonderful place, but I'd better not tell you the name. I'm not sure I know how to spell it." They both laughed. By the end of the night, he'd won her attention. Not long after, he'd won her heart.
They married in Tuscaloosa in 1946 and made their way back to Chincoteague by train, by bus, and finally by a middle-of-the-night ride across the causeway from a friend. Martha had never seen the island. She'd never met Donald's family. She moved in with his mother and began finding her place in both the family and the island community.
In those early years, Martha supported Donald through trade school in Philadelphia and a string of commitments in Chincoteague. Educated and capable, Martha easily found work and contributed to the family in many roles, including at the local Post Office.
In 1951, they welcomed their first child, Carlton. A few years later came their daughters, Jane and Donna, followed by their youngest, Arthur — a nearly 11-pound baby born when Martha was 39.
The family lived in Donald's mother's house on Cleveland Street until he purchased and cleared land on North Main Street and built the pony farm. Donald moved Martha and the children up the lane in the 1960s — and promptly took their only car to his job as a fireman at the Navy base on the mainland.
Martha and the kids were miles from town without any close neighbors, but like many women of her time, Martha simply made do. She'd send Carlton to town on the tractor for groceries. She'd let the girls ride horses to Cleveland Street to visit their friends — and arrange for someone to bring Donna home when she didn't want to ride the horse back. She put a bright red sweater on little Arthur so she could look out the window and spot him from a distance when he got a little too adventurous.
If you knew Donald, you know that keeping up with him was a full-time job in and of itself, to say nothing of keeping up with four children and a home. Here's the part of the story that doesn't get told enough: Donald may have been the dreamer, the builder, the make-it-happen man. Martha was the rock, the glue, the reason so much of it held together.
When it came time to open the Refuge Motor Inn, Carlton and Jane were grown, but Donna and Arthur were still at home. Martha wasn't eager to move a family of four — including an outgoing teenage girl and a rambunctious, outdoorsy eight-year-old boy — into the one-bedroom owner's apartment at the new motel. Donald told her it would be temporary. Two years, maybe. Then they'd hire someone to run the place and move the family back to the farm.
Instead, Martha made that little apartment work. She and Donald slept on a pull-out couch in the living room while Donna and Arthur shared bunk beds. The whole family shared a bathroom with the front desk staff. The kitchen was tiny, and the kitchen table sat just behind a door separating their home from the front desk — a door that was propped open as often as it wasn't. Staff ate dinner in the apartment almost as often as the family did.
While Don juggled a full-time job, the fire company, the ponies, the Chamber, the school board, and whatever else was needed of him for the well-being of the island, Martha ran the front desk. She made the coffee. She hired and trained the staff. She balanced the books — not just for the motel, but for all of the family's businesses.
She listened to every idea he brought home, sometimes agreeing and sometimes not, and more than once sat at their kitchen table wondering, as their daughter Jane tells it, "what in the world she'd gotten herself into."
Then she'd get up the next morning and do it all again. For seventeen years.
In 1990, Martha handed the management duties over to her daughter Jane, who is still at the helm today. Arthur’s young family moved into the apartment– thankfully expanded to two bedrooms and bathrooms. Martha and Don finally moved back to the pony farm, ending their day-to-day roles in the Refuge Motor Inn’s journey.
Martha built the Refuge into something much more than a collection of rooms and amenities. She knew how to make people feel like they belonged. Staff who came to work for her didn't just get a job. They got folded into a family — one that looked out for them through every high and low, the same way it looked out for guests. Two of the people who still greet you at the Refuge today, front desk manager Denise and housekeeping manager Dawn, started as young women under Martha's watch in the 1980s. They came as young employees in their teens and twenties, and quickly became part of the fabric holding the Refuge Motor Inn together. Today, they're department leaders carrying Martha’s legacy forward.
Martha was a steady presence at the front desk, day in and day out. She cared for her staff and guests as if they were her own. She built something worth staying for, one conversation at a time.
That's really what hospitality meant in Martha's hands. It wasn't a slogan on a brochure or an item on a training checklist. It was a habit: coffee and donuts for a stranger who might feel like family by checkout; staff members who stayed for decades because they knew they and their families were genuinely cared for; a door between home and the front desk that was rarely closed.
Martha passed away in 2012, two years after Donald. But you can still feel her at the Refuge — in the way the staff treats one another, in the people who have spent decades working here, and in the way this place has always tried to make guests feel as though they've come home rather than simply booked a room.
Don built a motel out of dreams, determination, luck, and a lot of help from his friends and family. Martha built a family who loves the place and each other, and turned a business into a home. It is our sincere honor to welcome back generations of guests to this magical place with the same hospitality and sense of family that Martha built all those years ago.