Hugh McErlane Branson
Hugh McErlane Branson, second son and second child of Thomas Henry Ousley Branson and Frances Bauer, was born 24 April 1875. His birthplace is now impossible to verify. The main family home was in the lowest foothills of Mariposa County, CA on a ranch near the Quartzburg mining outpost -- a spot otherwise known in that era as Washington Mine -- located a couple of miles north of the village of Hornitos. Logic dictates that is where he came into the world. However, at the time of his birth his father was spending most of his time in the newly-founded Central Valley city of Merced, where he was involved in launching Branson & Barcroft, a tinsmith business with partner Fred Barcroft. The Bransons may have maintained a second home in Merced, and even if they did not, there is nevertheless a chance that Hugh was born there while Thomas and Frances were lodging with relatives -- the most likely relatives being Thomas’s sister Phoebe and brother-in-law William McDonald. Hugh’s death certificate does state he was born in Merced. Alas, that source can’t quite be taken as definitive because the informant was his sister Inez. She was fifteen years Hugh’s junior and had not witnessed his birth. Inez may have only assumed the event occurred in Merced because she was aware of the timing of the Branson & Barcroft venture.
Hugh was named in honor of family friend Hugh McErlane, a Gold Rush miner and merchant from Ireland who had worked beside the Branson and Bauer men, and who would continue to be an associate of the clan until his death in Merced in 1890 at age sixty-five. For example, in the 1880s, Hugh McErlane was the business partner of Peter Harrington, husband of Nancy Anna Branson, in a liquor dealership in Merced. In the 1870s, several of the boys of the Branson clan were named after friends of the family, most or all of those friends being lifelong bachelors who would not otherwise have been able to pass their name down to another generation. It is somewhat ironic that the younger Hugh went on to be a lifelong bachelor himself, and failed to pass the name along any further.
Hugh enjoyed a stable and nurturant upbringing. His father worked variously as a tinsmith, blacksmith, carpenter, and miner. Aside from the part-time and ultimately temporary presence in Merced in the mid-1870s, Hugh spent his entire childhood in the home near Washington Mine/Quartzburg. Hugh was twenty-two years old when his father sold out to his brother Joe Branson, who had decided to expand his already-sizable cattle ranch to include the acreage of his brother and parents. Tom and Frances, along with Hugh and all seven of his siblings -- even the ones like Hugh who were already adults -- relocated a mile or so southward into the village of Hornitos. The house they chose had quite possibly formerly been the home of Frances’s brother Michael Bauer and family. The residence was along Burns Creek in a part of Hornitos considered to be the “Chinese” section of the community -- a natural place to choose to live given that Thomas Branson had learned to speak Chinese while growing up in the Gold Rush mining camp of Phillips Flat, and earned money serving as a Chinese-English interpreter for the Mariposa County court.
Hugh greatly enjoyed his increased immersion into the social and business life of Hornitos. He was a regular figure at dances, weddings, and lodge meetings. Music was another focus. He played violin with the village orchestra. His brother Will did likewise except that his instrument was bass horn. Sister Inez was also muscially gifted and would eventually participate in music events with them as a pianist, but that happened later, after she was old enough to do so. Hugh may have picked up his fiddle-playing from his uncle Alvin Thorpe Branson.
Being part of the community itself rather than hailing from the surrounding countryside also reinforced Hugh’s bond with his Bauer relatives including his two Hornitos-businessmen uncles, liveryman Michael Bauer and barber Joseph Bauer, and their families. Hugh had been close to his maternal grandparents, Egidi and Regina Bauer. Egidi (aka Gideon Bauer and Aegidus Bauer), was an immigrant from Germany famed in the early Mariposa County mining camps and later in Hornitos for his vegetables and fruits. Thanks to this formative influence, Hugh developed awesome skills in produce gardening.
The relocation also put Hugh more fully within the sphere of the Reeb family, which was headed by George Reeb, the proprietor of the meat market. Over the decades the bond between the Bauer and Branson clans with the Reeb clan had been and would continue to be strengthened, most pointedly by the 1902 marriage of Hugh’s sister Alma to George’s son Fred, and by the 1909 marriage of Hugh’s first cousin Lizzy Bauer to Fred’s eldest brother, George Manuel Reeb. In the early 1900s, Hugh was employed for a period as the driver of the Reeb butcher wagon.
In 1902 and continuing until 1908, Tom and Frances spent much of their time quartered at the Mount Bullion mining outpost, leaving it to unmarried adult kids Will, Hugh, and Evelena to look after the Burns Creek home. In some ways this was the main way Hugh’s “independent” phase of life expressed itself. However, he was less tied to his parents than Will, and did live apart from family members off-and-on during his late twenties and on through his thirties, mostly by bunking in miners’ barracks near the sites where he was working.
The mines of the area were of course more to him than a place to take off his boots and put his head on a pillow. Within his generation of the family, it could be fairly said that Hugh pursued mining as a career to a greater degree than any of the others, as for example in 1909 when he was the superintendent of the Monte Carlo Mine five miles northeast of Hornitos. He would probably have remained a miner all the way to retirement if he’d had the choice. Hugh kept to this career even as mines were failing all around the Mother Lode. His name appears on claims transactions well into the early part of the 20th Century. His first cousin Ivan Branson mentioned in his writings decades later that Hugh was the very last of the large number of Branson men to work the Number Nine Mine near Quartzburg. Hugh did not give up on the occupation until the World War I era, by which time his parents had left and had settled in Manteca, San Joaquin County, CA.
After the exodus, Hugh became a farm hand in the Central Valley. He may have lived with his parents at first -- and then with his father after the deaths of his mother and older brother Will on the same day in November, 1916, but he may have gone directly from Mariposa County to the farm of his sister Alice and brother-in-law John Henry Williams, which was also located in Manteca. There is no question that he sooner or later became Alice and John’s farm hand and housemate, as shown by his 1918 draft registration card. By 1919, though, he moved on to employment in Merced County. It seems possible he joined forces with his little brother Alex, who had become a ranch hand on the R.R. Phillips ranch. If so, this situation was disrupted by the death of Alex in the autumn of 1919 from sepsis caused by a wisdom tooth absess. By the 1 January 1920 date of the 1920 census, Hugh was a farm hand on the ranch of Fred Rodrugu and family, for whom he did carpentry work. One of the lasting legacies of Hugh’s time in Merced County was his on-going participation in the activities of the Oddfellows Lodge of Snelling, a small community not far from the Mariposa County line.
How long into the 1920s Hugh’s solo lifestyle lasted is not clear, except that eventually he went back to the farm of his sister Alice. Once there, he would live with Alice for the rest of his life. Chances are fifty-fifty that he made this move early in the decade. If not, then the most likely point of arrival was immediately after the death of John Henry Williams of pneumonia in the spring of 1923. At that point, if Hugh were not already in place, Alice would suddenly have found herself in need of an extra pair of hands to maintain the farm.
In about 1928, Alice ended her widowhood by marrying neighbor Milton James Henry. It would appear that she sold her property at that point and moved onto M.J.’s farm. Hugh was part of the package. Alice and M.J., whose own kids were grown by that time, occupied the downstairs of the farmhouse, with Alice’s youngest daughter Frances there as well long enough to complete her high school years. Hugh lived upstairs.
Surviving grand nephew Kenneth Williams (in an interview held 4 January 2011) remembers Hugh as a kind and friendly but extremely quiet man. He seldom spoke even to Alice, not even in the security of the family home. Typically he would head out into his garden or other parts of the farm as soon as he was done with breakfast and spend all day outdoors except for lunch time. The thirty-eight acres gave him plenty to do given that both he and M.J. followed the old-fashioned style of farming, using horses instead of tractors and keeping a full menagerie of farm animals. Hugh particularly liked to raise chickens. Preferring to be self-sufficient when it came to supplies, he grew all manner of seed for the chickens, including five acres or so of corn. Having so much corn and other fodder around, combined with plenty of spare milk from their resident cows, meant it was cheap to raise pigs, so Hugh and M.J. made a regular habit of doing so.
Hugh’s garden was a marvel. An acre of land was given over entirely to him for raising of vegetables in the manner of his grandfather, and quite possibly some of the original seed stock had been developed and/or maintained by Egidi Bauer all those decades before in Mariposa County. Hugh would grow his crops partly for purposes of harvesting the seed for sale to other growers. Kenneth Williams recalls that Hugh’s onions were so mild and flavorful a person could eat them like apples without them provoking tears from the eyes. It is unknown if Hugh had any title to the land in the sense of co-owning the deed, but surviving documents show he regarded himself as self-employed, i.e. he wasn’t just an employee for Alice and M.J., but a farmer in his own right, responsible for the specific crops and livestock he raised.
As mentioned, Hugh lived with Alice until the end of his life, a period that stretched all the way through the Great Depression and World War II years and beyond. He did not die on the farm, though. After suffering a heart attack in late October, 1949, he was admitted to Herrick Memorial Hospital in Berkeley. The choice of facility probably means that his sisters Inez and Alma took the responsibility of overseeing his care. (Their mutual home was by then just north of Berkeley.) Hugh lingered for six-and-a-half days until dying 5 November 1949 at the hospital. His body was interred in Stockton Rural Cemetery, Stockton, CA. By 1949, no empty lots were available in the section of the cemetery that contained the graves of his parents and brothers Will and Alex, so Hugh’s remains were placed with those of his mother, and his name and stats added to her headstone. (A similar arrangement was made for Inez when she passed away, her remains being added to the grave of brother Alex.)
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