Marion Co TOC

Photo taken in Nowata, OK ca 1905
Please see information below

Hello! Here is a picture to add to the Marion County pictures page. This was taken in Nowata, Okla. (Indian Territory) about 1905 but the bride is Luvenia Estes from Marion County. She was born there approx. 1882 as were her brothers and sister. Their parents were Ephraim Estes and Marinda Risley Estes. Ephraim's father was Edward Estes who was taken prisoner in the Civil War and died on Johnson's Island prison in Ohio. Edward's father was John Estes who was one of the earlier Marion county settlers. Ephraim's family (along with some of the Risley family) left Marion county, Ark. and moved to Nowata, Indian Territory area in 1902 where Ephraim died and was buried in 1904. Luvenia and her sister, Sarah Estes Tate, married shortly after that. Luvenia married Thomas Clyde Brannan (in the picture) who was a son of David Brannan who owned a farm in the Watova area and ran the ferry on the Verdigris river. Luvenia's children were born there including my father's mother, Mary Alice Brannan Creason. Another daughter, Dolly Brannan, is buried in Nowata (died at 9 years old of pneumonia).

This is the earliest picture I know of for Luvenia Estes Brannan. She also was married two more times - to Jim Tanner and to John Kolleas. Thomas Clyde Brannan divorced her, took the kids and married a girl just a few years older than his daughter, my grandma. Luvenia married Jim Tanner and my parents say he loved her dearly and treated her well. He owned saloons. But her daughter, Mary Alice, had ended up back in Oklahoma with her mom and Luvenia signed the papers so her 15 year old daughter could marry 23 year old divorcee, Otha Abraham Creason. Luvenia knew his family as her husband, Jim Tanner, had a sister to who was married to Otha's father, Simon Creason (after Otha's mother, Stella Mohney Creason had died in 1916).

Luvenia's mother, Marinda Risley Estes, was a daughter of Benjamin Risley and Sally Miller Brown Risley Anderson. Marinda and her family were in Ozark county, Missouri to being with. Sally's Miller family settled in that area in 1810 and she was born there in 1815. Benjamin Risley's father, Silas Risley, settled there some years later and Benjamin was born there. Sally was first married to Gid Brown in 1830 when she was 15 and he was 30. His family settled there in 1800. Gid was murdered by a peddler when he and Sally had been married just shy of 10 years. They had one child together. Sally married Benjamin Risley and they had 7 children. Benjamin died leaving Sally with a family of small children. She married Arch Anderson and was with him until she died of old age. Arch raised the kids as his own. It was after Sally and Arch were married that the family left Ozark county, Missouri and came to Marion county, Ark. where Marinda would meet her future husband, Ephraim Estes. Their first child, Sarah Estes Tate, was born in 1881.

I knew my great grandmother, Luvenia, well and spent as much time at her house as I could when growing up. She died in 1968 in her 80's from a heart attack brought on by her being very angry after a kid mowing her lawn stole her social security check off her kitchen counter when she was getting him a drink of water. Six months later in 1969 her daughter, Mary Alice, my grandma, died from gangrene brought on by complications from diabetes and a burn on her toe. Mary Alice was Luvenia's firstborn. My father, Otha Abraham Creason, Sr. (goes by the name John Otha), is the firstborn of Mary Alice.

I am the firstborn of my father's five children. My name is Anita Creason Messenger and my family and I have been living in the Hot Springs, Ark. area since 1980. I had no idea my Gram's family had so much history in Arkansas until just recently. Her future son-in-law, Otha Abraham Creason, Sr., was also born in Marion County, Ark. in Oakland in 1897. It's very possible that my Gram's Estes family knew my grandpa's Creason family. Grandpa's mother Stella Mohney Creason, had Mohney family members in the Oakland/Promised Land area. Her mother and her father's father are buried in the Promised Land Cemetary (I've been there). We are trying to find out more information about the Mohney's in Marion county but so far nothing. There have been Mohney's buried at Promised Land even in recent years. After several children were born in Oakland, Simon and Stella Mohney Creason moved back to Chelsea, Indian Territory, Oklahoma where their first child had been born before they moved to Marion county, Ark. Their last child, Blanche Creason, was born in Chelsea where her oldes brother, William Creason, was born. I knew a lot of these family members - even met Simon when I was a kid. Most of them had ended up in California where I was born. Even Luvenia - she left her husband, Jim Tanner, and moved to San Bernardino, Calif. because her daughter, Mary Alice and her family (grandpa and my 2 year old father) had moved there in about 1923. John Kolleas followed Luvenia from Oklahoma to Calif. and they ended up married. Many years later he divorced her for a younger woman and lived next door to Luvenia where she was living in the house they'd lived in as a married couple. She lived there until she died. I knew John as a grandpa when growing up. He was the only grandpa on that side that my father knew as a grandpa as Simon was living in Wyoming/Idaho with his second family and my father didn't meet him until he was a teenager. Simon ended up living in southern Calif. eventually and died there. My father says his family made a trip to Oklahoma to help move his grandma Luvenia back to California and he remembers a big flood that happened while they were in Oklahoma so this had to be in the later 20's or so.

I knew my grandparents very well until they died. I knew all of Luvenia's sons and their families, and I knew some of Grandpa Creason's siblings such as William (Uncle Bill) and Blanche and their families. I'm still in contact with a lot of them. Two of Otha's siblings died of TB as young adults so I never met them. A daughter of another sibling, Noe Creason, is younger than my dad and has been very involved in pulling the Creason history together for several decades. I'm going to contact Mary Ann and see if she has anything more about the Creason family when they were in Marion county - like pictures. We know there were other Creason lines in northern Arkansas as some of them fought and died in the Civil War for the South. If I remember correct, I found one of them on the casualty list for Pea Ridge. From what I've found so far, they were mainly in Washington county, etc., not Marion. I believe our line went to Marion county due to the Mohney's being there already that were Stella's immediate family. I have pictures of her, too. Our Creason line came from the Joplin, Missouri area into Indian Territory during the Land Rush. Simon and his brother came and staked claims. I'm assuming that he and Stella were already married as her Arkansas Mohney family came to Marion county, Ark. via Missouri and they were apparently already there when the Okla. Land Rush happened.

I have pictures of Luvenia taken after her wedding picture with Thomas Clyde Brannan, pictures of my grandpa Creason as a young man in Nowata/Chelsea, Indian Territory and on, pictures of Luvenia with her sons, grandsons, etc. Do you want any more pictures of this family line for the website or anything? My father had his 90th birthday on Feb. 17 and is still going strong. If anyone would like to talk to him, he'd do his best to give you whatever details he knows. He knew and remembers well his grandma Luvenia's brothers, Kenneth and William (Uncle Billy) who also ended up in southern California and died there. My mother is 13 years young than dad but she is still very sharp and active, too, and has a lot of info that dad's older family members shared with her after she married into the family.

Another thing that Gram (Luvenia) always told everyone in the whole family....that her mother, Marinda Risley, was a half breed Cherokee and Marinda's mother, Sally Miller Brown Risley, was a full blood Cherokee. We are trying to verify this. We do know that Miller is one of the names the Cherokee had - and so is Brown, the name of Sally's first husband, Gid. The Miller's moved into the Ozarks in 1810 when white men really weren't too many there yet. They came from Tennessee, a state with Cherokee. Gram said she hated to see the doctor's buggy coming because it meant there was another disease outbreak and he was coming to get her mom to help him. She said Marinda knew a lot of herbal medicines that she learned from her mother, Sally. Gram said her mom would be gone up to two weeks and when she left, they never knew if she'd come back alive or not. We know that an Estes married a doctor (one of Bejamin Mason Estes' daughters) and we're wondering if he might be the doctor that Gram told about - maybe he knew about Marinda because he was part of her husband's Estes family. So many questions!

Any info on the Estes, Risley, Creason, Mohney families while in Marion county would be deeply appreciated! I'm looking forward to hearing back from you - thanks!