On March 22, 1886, in the large corner room on the east side of the Dinsmore home, Isabella Dinsmore Selmes was born. Her name was given to her by her great-aunt, Julia Dinsmore, in honor of the infant’s grandmother, Julia’s sister. Isabella’s parents were Tilden and Patty Flandrau Selmes, and it was said that she favored her father’s side of the family in looks. When Isabella was a few months old, her mother took her back to the family’s home near Mandan in the Dakota Territory, where she would spend one of the coldest winters of her life. Julia Farley Loving, an African American woman, accompanied the Selmes family west and took care of Isabella from her first days through much of her adulthood.

Although Isabella’s parents, grandparents, nanny, and Owny Julia Dinsmore doted on her, the young girl grew up with an unspoiled temperament and a strong desire to make the world a better place for herself and those she loved. Like her mother, she confronted the death of loved ones several times in life, but she was strengthened by her experiences and her positive outlook on life never deserted her. Her childhood was spent in St. Paul, Minnesota, where her parents moved in 1887. Charles E. Flandrau and his wife, Rebecca, Isabella’s maternal grandparents, and her Aunt Sally and Uncle Frank (Acky Sally and Uncs) lived close by and she visited them often. The financial worries of her mother and her father passed by her as she spent her childhood days picking flowers, ice-skating, and sledding. In the summers, she, Julia Loving and her mother visited the Dinsmore farm in Boone County where she spent hours painting and learned to ride horses, fish, and play tennis.

Isabella’s life was altered in a significant way in 1895 when her father’s health complaints were diagnosed as liver cancer. After an operation, Tilden chose to spend the last few months of his life at the Dinsmore farm where Patty had always gone for love and spiritual renewal. Isabella arrived with Julia Farley Loving in late May and Sally wrote, “[She] is a comfort to them both I think and a help to Patty....I wish you could see Isabella going about in blue jeans over alls. She looks like a slim boy and when she wears Julia’s sunbonnet with them it is too funny.”1 Her father slowly weakened over the next weeks, dying on August 1st. Julia Dinsmore noticed that Tilden’s death had forever altered Isabella. Upon receiving a picture of the young girl in 1896, she wrote, “It is very sweet—the image of Til and has a thoughtful look that shows me that poor little It [Isabella] is getting acquainted with this world of ours.”2

But Isabella continued to take pleasure in life. She and Julia Farley Loving moved into the Flandrau house in St. Paul, where Patty would spend several months with them each year and they would all enjoy their summers at the Dinsmore farm. Patty was away from her daughter much of the school year because she had started a ham business after Tilden’s death as a way to bring in extra money and, probably, as therapy for her own depression. Although her mother was never very economical and never acquired much money, Isabella’s Acky Sally and Uncs were very well off and invited Isabella and her mother to live with them in New York City in 1901 so the young lady could attend better schools and mingle with a higher class of society than she would find in St. Paul. She attended Miss Chapin’s School and then Miss Spence’s School, but she never enjoyed studying as much as she did painting and socializing. It was during this period of time that she met and befriended Eleanor Roosevelt, either through her mother’s Roosevelt connections or through the new friends she was meeting in school.

In 1903, Charles Flandrau paid for Patty to take Isabella to Europe. Although Patty developed a drinking problem after Tilden’s death, there is no proof that it negatively affected her relationship with her daughter; instead Isabella thought of her mother as her “responsibility”—someone she needed to nurture and strengthen.3 Isabella’s return to the states was saddened by her grandfather Flandrau’s death, but she was kept busy in New York completing her last year of studies and looking forward to her debut into society the following year. Already, when she was just seventeen, Sally wrote that “Isabella’s circle of friends grows daily and one hears on every side the most extravagant praise of her. I think she ought to have a social triumph....”4

As anticipated, Isabella’s whirl in society was a great success—she dined at the White House, had lunch with Edith Wharton, and attended parties at various Roosevelt and Astor residences. She was always on the go, keeping Patty and Julia Loving very busy. Although Isabella’s nanny wrote that, “she has dead loads of admirers and nice men too—she seems to care only for the young men in her set,”5 by May 1905 Isabella was pondering an engagement to the thirty-seven year old Robert Ferguson, an old acquaintance of her mother’s. After spending almost a month together at the Dinsmore farm, she accepted his proposal and then agreed to an early wedding so she could accompany him on his vacation to Scotland to meet his family. The couple was married on July 15th, with the President of the United States, Theodore Roosevelt, in attendance. Not only was he a friend of Patty Selmes, he was also one of Bob’s closest companions. After being received graciously in Scotland, the couple were joined in Europe by Franklin and Eleanor Roosevelt, who were also honeymooning. Upon returning from vacation, Bob and Isabella settled into married life in New York City. In September of 1906 Isabella gave birth to a little girl. Following what was now a Dinsmore tradition, she named the child after the baby’s grandmother (who was also named for her grandmother), Martha. Instead of calling her Patty, though, everyone called her Martha, Marty, or Marshkins. A year and a half later, Martha welcomed a little brother, Robert, who was called Bobby, or Buzz. Soon after Bobby’s birth, Robert was diagnosed with tuberculosis. For treatment, the doctor’s suggested a sanatorium in the Adirondacks, but after two years of suffering the outdoor treatment and the separation of the family, Bob and Isabella decided to move west to New Mexico.

After first settling in Cat Canyon, the family eventually filed a land claim near Tyrone, New Mexico and called their new homesite the Burro Mountain Homestead. Isabella’s first years in the west were a great hardship—the family lived mostly in tents and had to do without many of the conveniences of the city. Once at the Homestead they built a large home and Patty, with help from Isabella, began tutoring the children so they would not fall behind in their studies when they were able to attend a normal school. Because of his illness, Bob remained in bed much of his life and the closest his wife could get to him was a hug. Although Isabella tried to get away from the homestead at least once a year, this was not always possible, but she did take the children to York Harbor, Maine; to Santa Barbara; and to Boone County, Kentucky. Occasionally she took a trip by herself and it was during one of these trips in 1813 that she found she was in love with her husband’s good friend, John Greenway, who was a mining executive in Arizona. John told Bob of his own feelings for his friend’s wife, with the result that he and Isabella agreed to never spend time alone together.6

Following the entry of the United States into World War One, Isabella helped to organize the Women’s Land Army of New Mexico and the women worked in the fields all day, harvesting crops for the men serving overseas. In 1920, Isabella took the children to Santa Barbara to enroll them in real schools. Martha was fourteen and Bobby was twelve. Although they missed the Homestead terribly, they were excited to be among so many other children. Robert made an occasional visit also, although he was not well. In the fall of 1922 he died from kidney failure. Isabella and the children accompanied his body to the family graveyard in Kentucky, where he was buried on the hill. Then she tried to accustom herself to a new kind of existence. Only thirty-six years old, she still had a lot of life left in her.

Early in 1923, she and John Greenway were spending time together and she was filling the empty spaces in her life with letters to him. Although she put off his proposals for some time, she finally agreed and they were married on November 4, 1923. Her mother had died that summer and the only thoughts that cheered her were of her children and John. After the wedding, the couple settled into Greenway’s home in Ajo, Arizona. In October of the following year, Isabella gave birth to the ten-pound John Selmes Greenway, dubbed “Jack” by the family. The happy family, however, was to be a fleeting moment for Isabella. Just a little over two years after their wedding, in January 1926, John was diagnosed with large gallstones. She was very reluctant to see him undergo an operation – fearing that, like Bob, he would become an invalid – but the doctors thought it would be best, so John agreed. He died on January 19th, leaving Isabella a widow again and only thirty-nine years old. On the train that took Isabella, her daughter, Martha, and John’s body back to Arizona, she miscarried his second child.7

Isabella kept John in her thoughts for many years, undertaking projects she thought would meet with his approval with money he had left her. In the late 1920s, she started her own company, the Arizona Hut, hiring only men who were injured or poisoned in World War One. While the company’s profits dropped considerably as a result of the Great Depression, Isabella—with Uncs advice—had sold her Copper stocks before the market tanked and was able to begin construction of her own hotel in Tucson, called the Arizona Inn, which she designed by herself. The Hut furniture was used to furnish the Inn, keeping the veterans employed. Isabella also became a partner in the Gilpin-Greenway Airlines which operated in the Southwest. And in 1933, she was appointed to fill a vacant seat for Arizona in Congress and then was elected in her own right the following year. Keeping busy seemed to buoy her spirits. In 1929 she explained to Uncs why the last winter had been one of contentment for her: “First off it has been one hundred percent strenuous with legitimate objectives that have had no note of tragedy in them, and, with the exception of two years of my life this is the first time this has happened for twenty-three years.”8

In the thirties, Martha and Bobby married and started their own families and Jack left home to follow in his father’s footsteps, first at Phillip’s Academy and then at Yale. While in Congress, Isabella met her third husband, Harry Orland King. Unlike her first two husbands, Harry was younger than Isabella—four years—and was the father of several children. They were married on April 22, 1939 and their marriage was a happy one. Isabella inherited the Dinsmore farm in 1947 following Sally Cutcheon’s death, but other than going through the contents of the house and outbuildings, she only made a few short visits. On her last stay in Kentucky, Beulah Brady, the wife of a tenant, was said to have found Isabella stretched across the bed her mother and grandmother had slept in when they were young, sobbing.9 She may have been recalling the many loved ones who had left her behind or she may have been contemplating her own mortality. Suffering from congestive heart failure, she often had trouble breathing. In 1953, after a series of heart attacks and a stroke, she died on the 18th of December and was buried in the family graveyard in Kentucky. Harry remarried after her death and lived another twenty-three years. When he died in 1976, he chose not to be buried with Isabella, even though his name is etched on a marble headstone in the Dinsmore graveyard.

¹ Sally F. Cutcheon to Charley M. Flandrau, 29 May 1895.
² Julia Dinsmore to Patty F. Selmes, 24 March 1896.
³ Kristie Miller, Isabella Greenway: An Enterprising Woman (Tucson: The University of Arizona Press, 2004), 17.
⁴ Sally F. Cutcheon to Julia Dinsmore, 7 February 1904. 5 Julia Loving to Julia Dinsmore, 19 January 1905.
⁶ Kristie Miller, 71-72.
⁷ Kristie Miller 128-131.
⁸ Isabella F. Greenway to Frank Cutcheon, 1 March 1929. 9 Kristie Miller, 258.

Click here for Isabella’s Congressional Biography.