Irene Anna Harrington

Irene Anna Harrington, daughter of Nancy Anna Branson and Peter Harrington, was born 5 November 1886 in Merced, Merced County, CA. She was sometimes known by her middle name, though nearly always in the form of the nickname Annie. Because of the prevalence of the nickname and the rare use of the formal one, her middle name was misrecorded as Anne on the genealogical list of the Branson clan compiled in the 1940s by her first cousin Maude Branson Chamberlin. Maude’s list was a major reference used in the creation of this website, and as a result the middle name was rendered here as Anne for over seven years. In early 2013 enough documentation was found to be sure Anna was the correct form. (The same error happened in the case of her mother.)

Irene’s father died not long after her third birthday, leaving her mother a widow with six children to support. Nancy dealt with the challenge by combining forces with her sister Mary Jane Branson Johnson, whose husband had run off, never to return. The two women operated a boarding house in Merced. Nancy was the housekeeper and cook, while Mary Jane handled laundry after working shifts as a clerk at a drygoods store. Irene and her siblings, along with Mary Jane’s youngest two children, spent the majority of their childhoods within that boarding house, which Nancy and Mary Jane continued to run until approximately 1902. Mary Jane’s eldest son, Clarence Johnson, lived next door as a ward of Theresa Branson Moore and her husband Will Moore.

In late 1896 Nancy married John James Napier, known as “Babe” Napier. He would remain Irene’s stepfather thereafter, though it does not appear he was heavily involved with the raising of the Harrington children, and was often gone on mining expeditions, including at least one trip to the gold fields of Alaska. Probably the only interval when he served as a somewhat traditional head of the household during Irene’s upbringing was in her mid-teens after Nancy and Babe reestablished themselves forty miles to the northwest of Merced in San Joaquin County outside the town of Manteca.

By the time of the shift to Manteca, Irene’s brother John was already grown up and gone, as were two of her sisters, Josephine and Eunice. Her sister Elsie stayed behind in Merced County. Therefore Irene was one of only two kids who moved along with Nancy and Babe, the other being her little sister Nina. In late 1905, Nina would marry and depart as well. Irene left, too, but not by becoming a wife. Her sister Josephine had wed at eighteen and Eunice and Nina both at only sixteen. Irene was like her sister Elsie and waited a bit. Ultimately she would not become a wife until nearly twenty years of age. (Elsie would be nearly twenty-four.) Meanwhile she went to Los Angeles, departing perhaps in 1904 or 1905 as her mother and stepfather were settling onto their long-term home on a farm in the Summer Home district east of Manteca, having spent the first two or three years in San Joaquin County on the west side of Manteca in or near the village of Lathrop.

Just what Irene did with herself during her Los Angeles sojourn is unknown. It’s likely her motivation was simply youthful wanderlust. The urge is more typical of males but is perfectly understandable in her case given how little private time she had enjoyed while growing up. Irene doesn’t appear to have been intimidated by the thought of fending for herself. She appears to have had a mind of her own and was willing to assert her opinions. For example, in the 1910s when California women were still pursuing the right to vote in national elections, she registered as a member of the Progressive party, even while her husband was a Republican. Her mother was a proponent of the idea that women should be educated and should have a voice in society. Accordingly, Irene finished all four years of high school in an era when it was not uncommon to stop short of that mark. She would go on to spend nearly all of her adult years as a housewife, but if born a generation or two later, she would surely have been the sort who attended a university and pursued a high-earning profession.

Her decision to return north was a case of coming back into the fold. Looking at the sequence of events from the perspective of over a century later, it appears that Nan Napier decided to instigate a bit of matchmaking on behalf of her final two unmarried children, and do it in such a way that both were drawn back into her sphere. As Nancy made friends in Manteca and immersed herself in the local social scene, she identified a couple of fellows as the right sort of matrimonial material for Elsie and Irene. One of them was Otis Cowell, only son of Joshua Cowell, whom many in the area considered to be the founder of Manteca. Otis could be said to have been “Manteca’s most eligible bachelor” in the early years of the 20th Century. Nancy steered him toward Elsie. Irene was pointed toward a friend of Otis named Claude Devere Salmon. The scheme worked out, leading to a pair of weddings in the autumn of 1906, both events held in Stockton and officiated by the same clergyman, Reuben Henry Sink. Rev. Sink had served in the same capacity a year earlier at the wedding of Nina Harrington, and would do so again in the mid-1920s at weddings of Irene’s daughter Wanda Salmon and her niece Norma Cowell.

Claude, whose middle name appears in various records as Devere, DeVere, de Vere, and De Vere, was a son of Alexander Salmon and Sophronia Sperry. Both the Salmons and the Sperrys had been among the pioneering families of Manteca, long associated with the Cowells both as neighbors and in a few instances as spouses. Claude was a California native, born 14 October 1877 decades after his grandfathers John Cutler Salmon and William Douglas Sperry had brought their households west. (W.D. Sperry chose to do so via the Isthmus of Panama; this may have been true of Cutler Salmon as well.) Claude, like Otis, had quite a pedigree in the local sense because his family had been in place for a such a long time. Cutler Salmon, deceased about a dozen years before Claude and Irene got to know one another, was famous locally not only as an early landowner, but for innovations such as being the first man in the area to install a gas furnace in his home. Cutler had previously been among the very first pioneers of southwestern Wisconsin. The discovery of lead ore lured white men into that area in the 1820s. At that point it was still a part of the country nominally under the control of native tribes. Cutler was a participant in the so-called Black Hawk Wars of the early 1830s that forced the Indians to relocate west of the Mississippi River.

Irene and Claude’s wedding took place 3 October 1906, to be followed by the wedding of Elsie and Otis just over a month later on the fourth of November. Suddenly Nancy, whose nest had completely emptied out with the 1905 marriage of youngest daughter Nina and the departure of Irene to Los Angeles, was able to celebrate as three of her daughters made their homes in the Manteca area. Elsie settled in with Otis within a few miles of his parents’ farm. Irene went to live with Claude on acreage belonging to his extended family. Added to the mix was Eunice, who with her husband Winfred Converse had spent the previous six years in Merced County, but who now decided to become part of the scene. The connection to Manteca would be lasting, particularly in the case of the Converses and the Cowells. Irene and Claude would occasionally be based elsewhere over the course of their thirty-four years together, but even when they ventured elsewhere, they were seldom gone for long.

Claude probably viewed Manteca as being in his blood and it would have been remarkable if he had agreed to live anywhere else as he and Irene were starting out. The local connections were so profound they popped up in every way, shape, and form. For example, Otis Cowell was not only his friend and the husband of his wife’s sister, but a cousin-in-law as well. Otis’s sister Meda had -- until her untimely death in 1900 -- been married to Claude’s double first cousin James Vincent Salmon. (“Double” means that not only were Claude’s and James’s fathers brothers, but their mothers were sisters, two brothers of the Salmon family having married two sisters of the Sperry family.) Otis’s sister Mary was the wife of another first cousin of Claude, Charles L. Salmon, a brother of James Vincent. Small wonder that the people selected to sign as witnesses on Otis and Elsie’s marriage certificate were Claude and Irene. (The photograph of a family picnic shown at left, from the collection of Irene’s sister Josephine, survives as evidence of the affection of these relatives. Otis Cowell is the man in the center, his wife Elsie in the foreground draped over his knee, Irene fondly leaning on his shoulder. The woman on the left of Otis is unknown, but may well be his sister Mary Edna Cowell Salmon. The man in back must be Claude, and the old woman his mother Sophronia Sperry Salmon.)

Irene and Claude produced just two children, a typical number for her generation of the Branson clan, and a striking change from her mother’s generation when six kids was a modest number. They had one girl, Wanda May Salmon, born in 1907, and one boy, Jack Wesley Salmon, born in 1910. Claude’s mother was part of the household during this stretch, a situation that persisted until her death in the spring of 1914. Sophronia had come to depend upon Claude in her widowhood -- the two had shared a house next door to that of Joshua Cowell for a number of years prior to Claude and Irene’s courtship. Irene was used to having “extra” members in her household and unlike some young wives, found it no hardship to share her home with her mother-in-law.

With his mother’s death, Claude was free to experiment with a new direction. He probably saw no future for him working any of the Salmon family acreage because his efforts were unlikely to put him in a command position. He was the youngest son of his immediate family and was far from senior among his first cousins. Instead, he tried farming forty miles due west of Manteca on acreage near San Ramon in Contra Costa County. He was probably employed by someone else. Claude and Irene are not known to have ever tried to purchase land and so their San Ramon sojourn, which lasted no more than a couple of years, was at most a short-term lease arrangement. Getting established as a farmer was a very hard thing to do in the United States in the middle of the 1910s due to high prices for acreage combined with low prices for crops. Claude must have grasped the bleakness of the possibilities. Instead, within a couple of years of the family’s return to Manteca, he obtained a job as a truck driver with Spreckels Sugar Company.

The change in Claude’s employment status was a personal instance of a cultural shift happening throughout California and most other parts of the nation. Young men of families who in previous generations had regarded owning a farm as the natural basis of a livelihood, left the fields and aimed their ambitions elsewhere. In some cases they found themselves immersed in occupations had not even existed as choices in their fathers’ time. This was certainly true in Claude’s case. His father had died before trucks with internal-combustion engines had become a feature of the modern world, requiring drivers to operate them. Irene’s grandfather John Sevier Branson had done a great deal of hauling as a means of supporting the family, but in his day, that hauling was done by oxen-drawn wagon. Soon not one of Nan Napier’s sons-in-law would be a farmer, except perhaps Otis Cowell, who may have kept it up as a sideline.

Spreckels Sugar Company had the virtue of being a steady employer. It was, in fact, the largest employer of the entire Sacramento-San Joaquin delta region. The sugar was made from beets, which grew well in the flat, alluvial landscape. One of the downsides was that the company holdings were so vast Claude sometimes needed to be at sites quite some distance from home. It was probably these work logistics that led to Irene and Claude moving at the end of the 1910s to a spot a few miles east of Manteca in Dent Township. They stayed for perhaps as little as two years before returning to Manteca for the greater part of the decade of the 1920s. While there, Irene supplemented the household income by working as a housekeeper at a boarding home. As far as can be determined this was the only time in her married life she had any wage-earning job. Both kids were of school age and she was able to fit in some part-time work. Certainly she had plenty of experience keeping a boarding house in good order.

The Twenties were in some ways Irene’s prime in terms of domestic and social life. The kids were still at home. Many members of the older generation were still around. Irene entered the decade still shy of thirty-five years old and was still short of forty-five when it ended, a healthy and active period for her. In terms of family, Manteca was rich. During the 1910s more and more of the Branson clan had settled there. These included her uncle and aunt Thomas and Frances Branson and several of their children, and of that branch, her first cousin Alice and her live-in brother Hugh would stay for many years, farming not far from her mother’s place. Her aunt and uncle Theresa and Will Moore moved to the town of Manteca itself in the first half of the 1910s, to stay for good. One of the most special arrivals of all was her first cousin Clarence Johnson and family. Clarence might not have been raised within the walls of the boarding house as had his younger siblings George and Bretelle, but he was very much a brother figure to Irene, Elsie, and Eunice, who were delighted that he was again living near them.

Nan Napier was the queen bee of the family social calendar, drafting into her bustle of activities her three local daughters, her sister Theresa, her niece Alice, nephew Clarence’s wife Lillian Brown Johnson, and eventually granddaughters Wanda Salmon, Josephine Converse, and Norma Cowell. In these pre-television, pre-internet, and pre-Women’s Liberation days, the importance of face-to-face social activities for women was immense. As the daughter and sister of Masons, Nan did not center her efforts around the church hall. She chose other outlets. For example, she was a core member of the Summer Home-Manteca Literary Society. Another priority were lodge meetings. The men had their separate groups. All the local Branson-clan women were part of the Native Daughters of the Golden West Phoebe A. Hearst Parlor No. 214 and often held various officer positions within it. Articles from the Modesto News-Herald refer to Irene as a trustee of the lodge in the early 1930s, and other articles mention she was secretary of the literary society in the late 1920s.

One of the lodge’s functions was to call attention to local history. The family’s own place in that history was not ignored. For example, on 30 March 1928, the lodge planted two trees on the campus of Lindbergh grammar school in honor of Sophronia Salmon and Otis Cowell’s stepmother Emily Frances Cowell.

Both of Irene and Claude’s kids left home young. First to go was Wanda, who wed Charles Patry, another Spreckels truck driver, 29 November 1926. (He was soon to change his last name to Patrie.) The event must have been sudden, because just two weeks before the wedding occurred, Wanda had left to attend nursing school in San Francisco. Apparently Wanda could not bear the thought of being apart from her boyfriend. Irene and Claude seemed to have given the match their blessing. They even arranged for their favorite clergyman, Rev. Sink, to perform the rites.

One of the reasons Irene and Claude may have been relieved to see their daughter married and heading off to her independent life was that Claude may have been worried he could not provide for her as he wanted to. Claude was nine years older than Irene. By 1926, he was already almost fifty. Unfortunately in his family, short lives were a tendency. Claude had apparently inherited that curse and was beginning to wear out. By the time he filed his draft card 12 September 1918 at only forty years of age, his hair had already gone grey. Another indication of his premature decline is this article from the 13 August 1926 edition of the Modesto News-Herald:

MANTECA, Aug. 12 -- (Special) -- Found lying alongside the state highway, C.D. Salmon of this city, employed as a field man by the Spreckels Sugar company, lies seriously ill in a hospital at Sacramento. X-Ray pictures will be taken in order to determine the cause of the illness. He started for his home here Saturday and was taken ill just a short distance from Sacramento, where he was found lying by the side of the highway by C.F. Wampler, a fellow employee, also of Manteca, who took him to a hospital and notified Mrs. Salmon. She visited the hospital yesterday, with the hope of bringing him home, but physicians in charge refused to let him leave until they made a further examination.

C.F. Wampler, mentioned in the article above, was no random passerby. A neighbor of Irene and Claude for about ten years, Charles Franklin Wamper would soon become an in-law when his son Guy W. Wampler married Ruth Martha Johnson, daughter of Clarence Johnson. C.F. would become an even closer in-law in the spring of 1929 when his wife’s niece Daisy Catherine Lynn married Jack Wesley Salmon. Just what sort of medical issue Claude experienced in 1926 that caused him to collapse is not addressed in family notes. He did manage to hang on for nearly fourteen more years, but it could be that the incident had long-term health ramifications. He was no longer a driver, but a field superintendent, and it could be the stress of his responsibilities, as well as the regular commute from Manteca to his employer’s vast sugar beet plantations in the heart of the Sacramento delta, had pushed him beyond his limit. The hospital bills may also have pushed the household finances beyond their limit. For the next five years or so, Irene and Claude do not appear to have had a home of their own. When Wanda and her spouse became established in the small community of Riverbank in Yolo County, Irene and Claude moved in as well. Then in 1929, the pair moved into Spreckels Company housing near Woodland, also in Yolo County. Jack and Daisy shared this home with them. Ordinarily that sort of sharing would indicate a set of parents helping out their newlywed son, but in this instance, Jack may well have stuck around to be sure his folks would be okay.

Claude did resume work. Both Riverbank and Woodland were closer to the heart of the Spreckels beet plantations and reduced his commute. Being in Yolo County meant Irene was close at hand in early 1931 when Wanda gave birth to what was to be her only child. (Shown at right is Irene holding her new grandson, Bobby Lee Patrie.) Irene was again on hand when Jack and Daisy became parents at the end of that same year. Sadly, the baby died at birth. Eventually, though, despite the hardships of the Great Depression, Irene and Claude were able to make it back to Manteca. They moved in 1932 or 1933. They did not go back to their previous dwelling, though. They found a new rental in the vicinity of the home of Eunice and Winfred Converse. Eunice and Win had recently gone through a similar ordeal, Win having suffering his own health crisis. In fact, for a period in 1930 and thereabouts, Win had boarded with Irene and Claude and Jack and Daisy, having become a Spreckels employee himself, while Eunice had stayed in Manteca as a retail clerk.

The return to Manteca lasted only through the mid-1930s. Later in the decade Irene and Claude returned to Woodland. This time they set up a home of their own on Pendegast Street, separate from Jack and Daisy, who had recently become parents of another son -- giving the baby the same name, Wesley, that they had given the infant who had died at birth in 1931. They were only able to enjoy this new set of quarters for a year or two. Claude’s condition grew more worrisome, and so Jack and Daisy and little Wesley made room for the old folks. (For a glimpse of that home as it looked in 1936, see the bottommost photograph in Nancy Branson’s biography.) Claude ceased being a field superintendent and became a weighmaster, a job that would allow him to stay put and take it easier. But this lightening of his workload was not enough to buy him a lot of time. Claude died 1 August 1940 in Woodland.

Two days after Claude’s death, Irene’s sister Elsie died as well. By then, Otis had been dead for six years, and for the previous two years Elsie had been living with big sister Josephine in Alameda, Alameda County, CA. Josephine extended the same invitation to Irene. Within a few weeks of becoming a widow, Irene had made the move. As Elsie had done before her, Irene served as an extra maternal figure for Josephine’s granddaughter Bobbie McDonald, whose mother was deceased.

The two sisters were grateful for each other’s company, but shared the Alameda home only until 1943 or so. Josephine’s husband Daniel Baysinger passed away in late 1942. Bobbie was in high school and no longer in need of as much supervision. Josephine did not have the need to maintain her own residence any more. As Josephine made new living arrangements for herself, Irene went to live with little sister Nina Riddell in Santa Cruz, CA.

Irene remained with Nina into the 1950s. However, eventually she slipped into a long phase of senility. She probably was a victim of Alzheimer’s Disease, though it was not called that in those days. Her kids took responsibility for her and moved her back to Woodland. Irene spent years in a convalescent home before she finally passed away 29 April 1966 in Woodland at seventy-nine years of age. Her ashes were inurned at the Woodland Cemetery mausoleum. Hers is one of a row of four family niches, the other three devoted to Claude, son Jack, and daughter-in-law Daisy.

Irene, center, is shown standing with her sisters Elsie Margaret Harrington Cowell, left, and Mary Josephine Harrington McDonald Baysinger, right. The elderly woman sitting in front is Nancy Anna Branson Harrington Napier. This is another of the “new baby of the family” photographs from 1931, taken on the same afternoon and in the same place as the one reproduced above right, and like all of the photos on this webpage, comes from Josephine’s memorabilia, preserved by her grandson William Seafield McDondld.

Children of Irene Anne Harrington with Claude Devere Salmon

Wanda May Salmon

Jack Wesley Salmon

To go back one generation, click here. To return to the Branson/Ousley Family main page, click here.