John Sevier Branson, Jr.

John Sevier Branson, Jr., fifth son and ninth child of John Sevier Branson and Martha Jane Ousley, was born 20 May 1868 at Grasshopper Ranch, his parents’ property on the northwestern side of Quartzburg, Mariposa County, CA.

The Branson family had just settled on their ranch. In fact, John Jr. was surely conceived not in Mariposa County, but in the Willamette Valley of Oregon where the family was attempting to establish a new home, having after nine years finally said good-by to their previous accommodations at Phillips Flat, a mining camp on the Merced River. Their new home was not far from the village of Hornitos. In later years, following the disappearance of Quartzburg and its stamping mills, miners’ barracks, and hitching posts from the face of the earth, John Jr. would describe himself as a native of Hornitos.

The family land adjoined the Washington Mine parcel. When John Jr. was an adolescent, Quartzburg itself was often simply called Washington Mine rather than Quartzburg. One would assume John Jr. would inevitably be a miner given his surroundings and his upbringing. That is what happened with his brothers Reuben and Alvin, but in his case, it was not so. His father had given up mining as a mainstay occupation even before John Jr. was born, and so the youth came of age with just as much, if not more, familiarity with his father’s other careers -- those of cattleman and teamster. These involved sources of income that allowed John and Martha to have a stable life, and indeed John Jr.’s childhood was profoundly stable -- he was already a full adult before he knew any home other than Grasshopper Ranch. None of his older siblings could say the same. Of the Branson-Ousley kids, only John Jr. and his younger sister Mattie were spared the transitory lifestyle experienced by the other eight.

John Jr. attended Quartzburg school, and as a teenager no doubt helped his father cut hay, tend the ranch’s horses, cattle, and oxen, and haul commercial loads. The latter occupation seemed to appeal to John Jr. He set his sights on acquiring a large wagon and team of draft animals of his own.

John Jr. married Lillian Jane Guest 15 January 1890 in Merced, Merced County, CA. This was also the wedding date of John Jr.’s sister Theresa to her bridegroom William Osborne Moore, an event also held in Merced. And therein lies a mystery. Theresa and Will’s joining took place in a private home in West Merced with only a small number of friends and associates in attendance. John and Lillian’s ceremony would appear to have taken place at another location, and was officiated by J.Y. Jones, a justice of the peace, who was not the individual who officated at the Moore/Branson event. Why would a brother and sister pick the same date for a wedding unless it was to be a double ceremony, with everyone in the family cheering on the two new couples? The implication is that John, Jr. and his sister -- a sister closer to him in age than any other except Mattie -- were on bad terms. There is nothing in family notes that confirms this or speaks to a reason for such a rift. Perhaps the rift is an illusion. Details of the two weddings are based on newspaper coverage and none of the articles is comprehensive. It is worth noting, however, John, Jr. and Theresa do not seem to have ever had much to do with each other after 1890. For example, John, Jr.’s sister Mary Jane Branson Johnson is mentioned as an attendee at the fiftieth anniversary celebration of John Jr. and Lillian’s marriage held in 1940, and Mary Jane is therein referred to as having been a guest at the wedding in 1890. Theresa is not mentioned, though she was still alive in 1940 and could have come to the party. Granted, the date was the fiftieth anniversary of her own wedding and she may not have wanted to go to a party when her own spouse was not around to share the cake and champagne.

Lillian was a daughter of John William Guest, Sr. and Elizabeth Tracy. Lillian had been born 24 December 1872 in Bear Valley, Mariposa County, CA, where her parents had settled in 1859. John Guest had been born in England about 1829 and had come to Ohio in about 1850, where he worked as a miner. He had met Elizabeth there and had married her at Athens, OH in 1853. The first three of their children had been born in Ohio. Lillian was one of the seven younger children born in Mariposa County. Lillian was no stranger to her betrothed. Her brothers worked at the Washington Mine. The very eldest of those brothers, John William Guest, Jr., had become the husband of John Jr.’s second cousin Mary M. Scott back in 1878. In becoming husband and wife, John Sevier Branson, Jr. and Lillian Jane Guest were reinforcing a connection that had existed for many years.

In the earliest part of their marriage, John Jr. and Lillian resided at Grasshopper Ranch. Their first child, Joseph William Branson, was born there in December, 1890. Among the ways that John Jr. earned money to support his growing family was raising cattle. The ledgers of Hornitos butcher and meat-market owner George Reeb -- a close associate of the Branson family -- show that some of George’s acquisitions of animals for slaughter during the mid-1890s were purchases from John Jr. and not from his father. John Jr. however is not known to have owned any land, so either he rented land nearby, or more likely, he looked after cattle on the land of his parents, or his brother Joe, or his brother Tom, or all of them, and some portion of the herd was regarded as his.

Raising stock was an occupation that did not require a man to be on-site all day long each and every workday. As long as fences were in good repair and as long as the cattle were branded, they could be left on their own to graze for substantial stretches, which meant that John Jr. was able to generate income in a variety of ways. Accordingly he began spending more and more time in the hills of Madera County. Eventually this led to a cutting of the apron strings. A voter registration roll shows him still in Hornitos as of October, 1892, but soon he and Lillian and little Joseph became based in those Madera County hills in the small community of Raymond. They were still in the Mother Lode, but were close to the region’s southern limit. Among other things, this meant John was finally in an environment where most of the people around him were unacquainted with his father, and so he did not have to be called Junior. (Accordingly, for the rest of this biography, he will just be called John.) Second son Henry was born in Raymond in September, 1893. It was probably some time in the next few years that a pregnancy resulted in either a late miscarriage or a stillbirth. Family records are not robust enough to be certain the event took place. If it did, the child was probably never given a name.

Raymond was also where John’s much-older brother Reuben and family had found themselves at just about the same point in time. One of the side effects of this proximity was that John was the Branson uncle that Reuben’s kids knew best. Both households would linger in Raymond for most of the middle part of the 1890s. During those years, John made his living by hauling supplies, taking the necessities of life uphill for the miners and loggers there, and bringing downhill such material as cobblestones from the large granite quarries of the region -- during the turn of the century cobblestones were still a common type of street paving, regularly needed.

Among the more colorful aspects of John’s occupation is that shipment wagons such as his were the means of transportation for the ladies of the night who worked the Mother Lode. These women would travel from mining camp to logging site to mill, plying their trade in a circuit. They were not permitted aboard the stage coaches that operated between the major junctions, and like Chinese and black citizens, had to depend on less conspicuous modes of travel. From the vantage point of the 21st Century it is impossible to know what John thought of this situation. It is appealing to imagine he enjoyed not only the extra income contributed by his passengers, but appreciated having people of all backgrounds perched behind his bench or seated beside him, sharing stories, news, and jokes with him, and no doubt making fun of the authority figures of the day. Perhaps the friendships gleaned during those trips led to his employment as a saloonkeeper (the occupation cited on an 1898 list of registered voters of Madera County).

Perhaps he had turned to saloonkeeping because he was tired of having to head off with his wagon and be separated from Lillian and his boys overnight far too often. Saloonkeeping wasn’t a good match for him, either, and he soon turned to working as a laborer in the lumber camps of the region. This was the sort of thing his brother Reuben had often done during the 1890s when mining efforts failed to keep food on the table. In a sense, John replaced Reuben because Reuben and family gave up on Raymond in 1899 or the early part of the year 1900, and moved all the way out of the Sierra Nevada and took up temporary residence in a rental home in the city of Madera. John and Lillian remained. In 1901, he obtained a job at Peckinpah’s Mill, the large lumber camp and mill owned by Madera County lumber pioneer Charles Mortimer Peckinpah. This gig lasted at least through the end of the season, i.e. until enough snow piled up in November to interfere with operations.

For much of that interval -- June to November, 1901 -- John and Lillian took in his nieces Mamie, Mabel, and Mattie, either at the same time, or in sequence. Reuben and his wife Louisa had separated and were not on speaking terms. The three young women, ranging from nineteen to twenty-four years old, were old enough not to be obliged to remain in the home of either parent, and were eager to remove themselves from the conflict. Inasmuch as John and Lillian only had boys, they appreciated having surrogate daughters around for a few months and were glad to help out at such a bitter juncture.

It is probably obvious to any of you perusing this page that the photos here are not of the same high standard displayed on John’s siblings’ biography pages. Unfortunately there has so far been no means to fix that frustrating situation. No good source photos have turned up with the exceptions of the tintype of John as a young boy, and others taken from 1940 and later. That leaves a span of sixty years unrepresented by any pictures of similar quality. The image shown just above this caption is probably the worst instance of “having to use what’s available.” It was scanned from a photocopy made back in the 1970s or early 1980s, a time when photocopiers almost always greatly exaggerated the contrast of photographic prints. However, the image is the only one found that shows John as he looked in his fifties, so it has been used despite its flaws. This scene probably dates from the late 1920s and shows the three surviving Branson brothers and their wives. Left to right: Alvin Thorpe Branson, Mary Eliza Simmons Branson, Ellen Margaret Geary Branson, Joseph Branson, John Sevier Branson, Jr., Lillian Jane Guest Branson. Maybe with luck, eventually someone will find the original photograph from which the photocopy was made, and will scan it for use here.

John proved himself to his lumberman coworkers and was able to land a choice job with Sugar Pine Lumber Company. “Choice” in this instance means, he didn’t have to work his tail off up in the mountains. Sugar Pine not only harvested trees and milled them up at their high-elevation outposts, they also had a yard and warehouses down in the San Joaquin Valley part of the county in the city of Madera, where the finished lumber could be loaded onto trains to head off to customers throughout the state. The wood was sent out of the mountains by means of a sixty-three-mile-long flume. (The flume may have been the same one that had played such a dramatic role in the birth of Reuben’s daughter Gertrude in 1891. See Reuben’s and Gertrude’s biographies for details.) John scored a position at the valley facility. This meant he was sure of employment even when work in the mountains was paralyzed by snow. Moreover, it was a steady situation in both the sense of fixed work shifts and in terms of a long-term future. John and Lillian were finally able to buy a house and stay put, ending the unasked-for instability of the first dozen years of their married life. They hadn’t wanted to move around. They loved staying put. And indeed, they never lived anywhere but the city of Madera until the end of their days. Most, or even all, of that time was spent at a residence at 832 Washington Avenue.

The experience of having one or more Branson bachelorettes in the home inspired John and Lillian to extend an invitation to another of his nieces. This time it was not a daughter of Reuben, but of Thomas. The circumstances were entirely different. Thomas’s marriage to his wife Frances Bauer was still going strong more than thirty years after the wedding, and their home was as nurturant a venue as could be. But by the summer of 1904 their eldest daughter, Evalena -- often known as Lena (pronounced LYE nuh) -- had reached twenty-seven years of age and she had grown tired of being labelled an old maid by her married female contemporaries back in Hornitos. Life in a less provincial environment suited her desires, and so Evalena came to stay with John and Lillian. It worked out well. Lillian in particular appreciated not having to be surrounded by males on every side, no matter how beloved her husband and sons were. Evelena stayed until at least 1907, and probably remained until early 1910, when she wed Charles Diffin -- a man she had met during her Madera sojourn -- and headed off to establish a home with him in Antioch, CA.

In 1907, Lillian and John were finally blessed by the birth of a daughter, whom they named Dorothy. She was not only the final child of their own, but she represented the completion of the whole level of the family tree. After the birth of their own Henry in 1893, the only subsequent grandchild of John Branson, Sr. and Martha Ousley had been Alvin’s boy Ivan, born in 1901. Dorothy was the last of all. By the time she came along, the next generation had been underway for most of a decade and John had already been made a grand uncle several times over.

Soon the two sons of the family were ready to make their own way in the world. Joe became a married man in early 1912, Henry in the summer of 1916. At first both remained in Madera along with their wives, but that changed before long. Henry took a job as a night foreman for Yosemite Lumber Company at their huge sawmill at Merced Falls (which as it happens was just a few miles from Hornitos). In April, 1921 at age twenty-seven, he was killed in an accident at that facility.

Henry left two surviving children, son Beverly Orwin Branson, age three, and an infant daughter, Betty. His widow Ada (Crane) sought the comfort and shelter of both her own relatives and John and Lillian. Ada and her youngsters were enough of a fixture in John and Lillian’s lives during the mid-1920s that when the house on Washington Avenue was consumed in a fire and had to be rebuilt from scratch, the couple decided to erect an addition connected by a short causeway in which the grandchildren and their widowed mother could live. Even after Ada married Matthew Huddleston (in about 1926) and made a home with him in San Francisco, Beverly and Betty -- sometimes with and sometimes without their mother -- continued to be frequent visitors, keeping the family bond intact despite the loss of Henry. Beverly was there enough that it was Madera High School from which he graduated, and at age eighteen (in 1939) Betty moved in full-time for a couple of years, and it was during that phase of her life that she met Bert Smith, the man she would marry (in 1941). After Matt Huddleston’s death in 1947, Ada would return to the nearby parts of the Central Valley, settling in Winton, Merced County, CA, near Atwater.

Having these relatives near at hand compensated for the fact that son Joe and his wife Mildred left Madera toward the end of the 1920s and did not return, instead becoming fixed in place in Santa Ana, CA. The emotional bond between Joe and his parents remained strong, but that closeness was not expressed as often as it would have been if the geographical distance had not been a factor. Fortunately Dorothy remained local and John and Lillian never had to cope with the lack of her regular presence in their lives.

In the 1920s, in his fifties, John left the lumber company job, switching to an even-more-secure employer, the Madera Department of Public Works. He was in charge of maintaining the street-sweeping equipment (changing the brushes, etc.). He kept this job until retirement.

The fiftieth wedding celebration, hosted by Dorothy at her home, was a huge affair. There were over one hundred guests. As mentioned above, there is some doubt Theresa Branson Moore attended, but Mary Jane Johnson was there and so was Lillian’s sister Annie Gourguet. A plethora of nephews and nieces represented the families of most of the couple’s other siblings, those siblings having for the most part already gone to their graves by 1940. Dorothy even arranged for a congratulations letter to be sent by President Franklin Delano Roosevelt. (Actually sent by his staff, of course.)

Lillian died 11 September 1944, leaving John a widower. Dorothy and Betty looked after him over the next half-dozen years.

John was the last of his generation to pass away, doing so 27 February 1951 in Madera. Like so many Bransons, he is buried in that city’s Arbor Vitae Cemetery.

Children of John Sevier Branson, Jr. with Lillian Jane Guest

Joseph William Branson

Henry Jefferson Branson

Dorothy Arline Branson

For genealogical details, click on each of the names.

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