Marian Ruth Warner

Marian Ruth Warner, daughter of Grace Mildred Branson and Albert Frederick Warner, was born 11 January 1915 in Sanger, Fresno County, CA. She was the eldest child in her immediate family, but a younger one in her generation of cousins, in great part because her father was a younger son who had not had kids right away, and her maternal grandfather Joseph Branson had also founded his family later than most of his siblings. Marian’s name is ususual in a genealogical sense. She was born in an era when parents still tended to give offspring names that honored individuals of previous generations, but this is not the case with either “Marian” or “Ruth” along any line of her ancestry.

Bert and Grace Warner had settled in Sanger in 1911 just after their wedding. In 1913, the pair were able to obtain a mortgage and move into a good existing house at 824 N Street. That house is believed have been the very place where Marian was born, and it would serve as her family’s home throughout her childhood. (It remained her parents’ residence for another forty years after she had moved away.) The one big change in living circumstances while she was growing up was that in 1925, her father added two upstairs bedrooms to what had previously been a one-story dwelling, allowing Marian and her younger sister Josephine to have their own rooms as they entered adolescence.

(At right, Marian and her first cousin Hugh Geary Branson in 1920 at a family gathering at their mutual Branson grandparents’ ranch in Mariposa County.)

Marian was a graduate of Sanger High School. It was probably there that she met Walter Bert Weldon, Jr., son of Walter Bert Weldon and Edith May Eversoll, and the two eventually became romantically involved. Walt, born 14 December 1914, was less than a month older than Marian. He had been born in the foothills of the Sierra Nevada to the north and somewhat to the east of Sanger, in a spot known sometimes as Burrough and also as Burrough Valley, but this was (and is) a name used mostly by locals and it is generally handier to use the place name of Tollhouse, after the small village two miles to the north. That part of the foothills did not have its own high school at that time, which was why Walt attended classes all the way out in the Central Valley in Sanger, though it required a one-way commute of over thirty miles, some of it on narrow, winding roads. It may have been Marian’s friend Constance Mills who steered her in the direction of Walt. Constance’s parents Ray and Lucy Mills operated the general store at Auberry, not far from Burrough and Tollhouse, the store being a spot where locals congregated and got to know one another while purchasing supplies. Pictures survive of Marian standing outside Constance’s home in 1930, when Marian and Constance were both fifteen.

Walt was the son of a cattle rancher. For much of his youth, he had been the only son. Even after the birth of siblings Carrel and Edith in the mid-1920s, he was still the eldest and was expected from an early age to carry himself like a man. Raised in circumstances that emphasized toughness and self-reliance, Walt was very much a product of his upbringing, thrust at age eight into the family trade. His father, a Tennessee native, was a cattleman’s cattleman, as serious about his profession as could be. In 1909, before young Walt had come into the world, Walt, Sr. had obtained the largest cattle-grazing permit in the whole Sierra National Forest, allowing him to distribute his animals throughout a wide swath of public land in the upper elevations of Fresno County. In his turn, Walt would take over this permit and his main herd would consist of the descendants of the animals purchased in 1909. All of this meant that when Marian agreed to marry Walt, she placed herself in an entirely different world than the one in which she had been brought up. She was the child of a merchant and gasoline station owner, a man who had done so well with his business ventures that he was already retired by the time Marian and Walt became engaged, even though he was only fifty years old. Marian was used to comfort. She was accustomed to having neighbors in houses that stood only eighteen feet away from her own to north and south. She exchanged it for a life in which she would often find herself at work campsites at nine or ten thousand feet up in the mountains, a day’s horse ride away from the nearest building and far from the company of any human beings other than the ones she had journeyed there with -- and sometimes, that company consisted of just one person, Walt.

The wedding was held 19 December 1934 in Sanger. Walt had just turned twenty. Marian was just about to. The marriage would last fifty years and come to its end only as a result of Walt’s death. For much of that span, the pair’s main residence was a ranch along Tollhouse Road just down the road from Tollhouse itself, a few miles from Walt’s parents’ place in Burrough Valley. The house, originally constructed in January, 1867 as the residence of lumber mill operator John W. Humphrey(s), was a local landmark inasmuch as it had been the first permanent wood-frame family home built in the Tollhouse area. Walt’s grandfather William M. Eversoll had long been associated with the Humphrey(s) family. In fact, during the years when Walt and Marian were beginning their life together, elderly William was a lodger in the home of John Humphreys, Jr.

Over the course of their years together Marian and Walt produced three children, all daughters. They did not rush to found this family. Their firstborn child arrived more than five years after the wedding. (Marian is shown left with that baby 21 January 1941.) It was half a dozen more years before the next came along. This have one and wait-a-long-while to have a second one was the same pattern Walt’s own parents had followed.

The years when the kids were growing up corresponded to the period when Walt increasingly took charge of the Weldon herd. By the early 1950s, his father was into his seventies and inevitably had to scale back. Walt, Sr. (better known as Bert) passed away in 1961 at age seventy-eight. By then, Marian and Walt’s eldest daughter was married and their son-in-law became the “next man up” in the cattle operation behind Walt and Carrel. The young couple established themselves in a house on the main property, within walking distance of Marian and Walt’s place but hidden from it on the other side of a hill, a set of logistics that provided each household with a modest but essential degree of privacy. Meanwhile the proximity meant that Marian and Walt were able to be involved in the lives of their first set of grandchildren on a daily basis.

One of the most dramatic incidents in Marian and Walt’s life occurred late on the night of 19 September 1963 while returning to Tollhouse from the High Sierra meadows. They were driving separate vehicles down Tollhouse Grade, an extremely windy, narrow road that ran along the steep mountainside east of their home. Marian was in the lead. When she reached the ranch at approximately 11pm, Walt did not show up. His headlights had been visible in her rearview mirror when they had started down the grade. Under normal conditions he would not have ended up more than a minute behind her. She went back up the grade with a flashlight and found the tire tracks of his jeep heading right off the road at one of the steepest spots. The steering on Walt’s jeep had failed. She couldn’t see the vehicle, which investigators would estimate had rolled over at least eight times as it tumbled down the mountain, but she did hear Walt moaning. He had not been wearing a seatbelt. As a result, he had either been flung free or had leaped out (he would later be unable to remember which). While Marian was searching with her flashlight beam, he was lying on a ledge about a hundred fifty feet below the roadway. His hip had been dislocated. Marian fetched local deputy constable William Eva, who phoned the Fresno County Sheriff’s Office for assistance. While waiting for that assistance to arrive, Eva’s son Kenneth Eva rapelled down the cliffside and found Walt. It took until three in the morning before the Evas and the men from the sheriff’s office finished raising Walt to the roadway in a wire stretcher. He was rushed to the hospital in Clovis. For the rest of his life, Walt walked with a severe limp. Some of the impairment was inevitable, but part of it was due to the way the injury healed. Walt refused to have surgery that might have improved his condition.

In 1964, Marian and Walt’s middle daughter married a fellow from Nye County in central Nevada. The newlyweds established themselves on his family’s ranch in the Smoky Valley north of Tonopah. The property was also the site of his widowed mother’s bar/restaurant and service station, which in turn played a major role in the daily lives of the family there. Two years later, Walt and Marian’s youngest daughter married another son of that family, and once again, off went a Weldon girl to become part of the scene in Nye County. The situation meant that reunions of Marian and Walt’s immediate family now required excursions across a tall mountain range and a chunk of desert. However, the rustic and isolated venue of central Nevada appealed to Walt, and coming home for holiday or summer-vacation visits appealed to the younger folk, and so Weldon-clan get-togethers happened with regularity.

As the years went on the Weldons collected a number of acknowledgments of their stature within the beef producers industry. At the end of 1970, Marian was named CowBelle of the Year for Fresno County at the annual meeting of the California Cattlemen’s Association. Walt was named Cattleman of the Year by the Fresno-Kings Counties Cattlemen’s Association in the spring of 1976. Ironically this particular accolade came even as his connection to the area was finally weakening. The ability to make a living raising cattle had become more challenging for American ranchers over the course of Walt’s career. One major factor was competition from other countries as the shipping of perishables over large distances became more and more practical. In California, the problem was magnified by the high price of grazing land compared to other areas such as, say, Nebraska. At one Christmas gathering in 1973, Walt mentioned that the price for beef was the same per pound that year as the Weldons had received in 1953 -- yet in those twenty years, his costs had doubled. In the face of these economic pressures, Walt and Marian began raising more of their livestock along the California/Oregon border. While there, they lived at New Pine Creek, Lake County, OR. The couple happened to be staying at that residence when Walt perished of a heart attack 30 May 1983.

Walt could be said to have simply worn out, his cigarette-smoking habit having accelerated his decline. But Marian was robust and healthy and her experience as a cattleman’s wife had toughened her even more, so her widowhood was by no means a somber, rocking-chair-bound phase for her. Not even seventy when she was widowed, she had a lot more mileage left in her. This was sometimes literally the case as she was now at liberty to take trips Walt would have found hard to deal with given his bent body and bum hip. Marian’s longest foray was to the United Kingdom, a trip she took in her eighties, accompanied by her sister Jo’s sister-in-law Mildred Smeds, another eightysomething-year-old. Together the two old ladies toured the waterways of England in a canal boat.

When Marian was eighty-nine, Josephine passed way, but Marian -- despite being the elder sister -- was still going strong. She was able to stay on the Tollhouse ranch until well into her nineties. Unfortunately, she was ultimately unable to truly challenge her father’s extraordinary longevity record. Needing full-time care, she moved into a convalescent facility in Auberry, the same small community where her high school friend Constance Mills had once dwelled, and therefore a place familiar to Marian since at least 1930. She perished there Thursday, 2 September 2010 at age ninety-five. She was buried beside Walt 10 September 2010 at Tollhouse Cemetery.

Descendants of Marian Ruth Warner with Walter Bert Weldon, Jr.

To go back to Marian’s father's page, click here. To go back to her mother’s page, click here. To return to the Branson/Ousley Family main page, click here. To return to the Martin/Strader Family main page, click here. To return to the Warner/Alexander Family main page, click here.