Mary Jane Branson

Mary Jane Branson, the third daughter and seventh child of John Sevier Branson and Martha Jane Ousley, was born 25 July 1862 at Phillips Flat, a gold mining outpost along the Merced River, CA. She grew up mostly in Mariposa County, first at Phillips Flat (a place that now lies submerged beneath Lake McClure reservoir), then a year (1868-69) in the Willamette Valley of Oregon, and from the age of seven onward at “Grasshopper Ranch,” her parents’ longterm estate a few miles north of Hornitos, CA. Mary Jane is not to be confused with her brother Reuben’s daughter Mamie, who formally was also named Mary Jane Branson.

Grasshopper Ranch adjoined the property of the Washington Mine, one of the most active hardrock mines of the latter part of the Mother Lode era and a major employer in Mariposa County. Mary Jane’s brother Alvin began working there in the late 1870s. One of Alvin’s co-workers was Alonzo Diah Johnson. Alonzo married Mary Jane on 17 March 1880. The marriage certificate was completed at Washington Mine (Alvin was one of the signatory witnesses), and it is possible this was the location of the ceremony. But a wedding at Grasshopper Ranch is a more likely scenario. If this were the case, the document would still refer to Washington Mine because this would have been the closest place to Grasshopper Ranch where a pastor or justice of the peace was available to provide a signature.

The marriage certificate states that Alonzo was a native of Vermont and was twenty-six years old, which puts his birth in late 1853 or early 1854. (Certain informal family records render his name as Alvin or Andrew. These are pure conjectures or mistakes. However, the spelling Alorizo also appears in earlier genealogies assembled by diligent researchers. The errant rendition appears to have originated in a misreading of the certificate, one of the few public records that remain to mark Alonzo’s existence. On that paper, the “n” in his name is broken, making it look like an “r” followed by an “i”.) Alonzo is likely to be the person shown in the 1860 and 1870 censuses for Vershire, Orange County, VT as a son of John F. Johnson and his wife Betsy (or Betsey). That child of the household is listed in 1870 as Alonzo D. and in 1860 as “Dyer A.” -- a phonetic near-match for “Diah A.” -- and the ages of Alonzo D. and Dyer A. are consistent with Alonzo Diah’s age as calculated from the marriage certificate. A compelling detail is that the Vermont family includes a daughter named “Burdil C.,” and a “Bretelle C.J. Eastman” of the right age appears in the 1920 and 1930 censuses for the same county. This Burdil/Bretelle was no doubt the source of the middle name given to Alonzo and Mary Jane’s daughter, Alice Bretelle Johnson.

If Alonzo’s origins are somewhat murky, his fate is even more so. He vanished from the scene some time during the late 1880s or, less likely, the early 1890s. The development may have occurred within months of the 1887 birth of Bretelle, the couple’s third child. The often-repeated explanation is that he died in a mining accident, perhaps in Arizona or New Mexico. (Many miners left the Mother Lode during the 1880s to work in mines of the Southwest. Alvin Branson is known to have done so for a few months in the early 1880s.) However, this sort of sudden and dramatic demise has proven impossible to confirm through objective sources. Contrariwise, Mary Jane’s niece Grace Mildred Branson Warner (daughter of Joseph Branson) wrote a comment in a genealogical note stating that her aunt Mary Jane’s husband had left her. Certainly if Alonzo died, that would have been one way of “leaving,” but it has to be noted that Mary Jane, though she lived another sixty years and more, never married again. She was only twenty-five in 1887. She was regarded as a beauty and was known to have had male admirers. For her to have forged on alone supports the gossip that indicates she had a bad marriage.

Whatever the particulars, Mary Jane was left a single mother with three minor children. It is not entirely clear where she and Alonzo spent the mid-1880s. The couple would have been in Mariposa County early in the decade -- an 1882 mining claim includes the names of Alonzo, brother-in-law Alvin, and a third partner. If the story of Alonzo mining in the Southwest is accurate, then Mary Jane and the kids would have been there for a stretch, and came back to California after his death. Once Mary Jane became a single parent, however, her whereabouts are well accounted for -- she dwelled in Merced, Merced County, CA. This kept her near her sisters Nancy Anne Branson Harrington and Theresa Branson, as well as near her brother-in-law William McDonald, the widower of her sister Phoebe Ann Branson McDonald. Merced was also only a few hours by horse and/or wagon from the kinfolk who still resided at Quartzburg and in Hornitos. (A 1920 census record of her oldest son, Clarence, states that he was born in Merced; if this is accurate, then Mary Jane may have been living in Merced even in the early 1880s, before the loss of Alonzo.)

She took a full-time job as a clerk in a Merced drygoods store. A family memoir recalls that Mary Jane owned a boarding house along with Nancy, which they operated together -- Nancy on-site round the clock as cook and housekeeper, Mary Jane doing the laundry in the evening after her shifts at the store. This may have been a scheme the sisters developed during the 1880s, but it probably sprang into being in 1890. In January, 1890, Nancy’s husband Peter Harrington unexpectedly died while on a trip to San Francisco, and Nancy was left spouseless with a brood of six children to care for.

Once the boarding house came into being, Mary Jane lived there, and kept her younger two children, George and Bretelle, with her. Eldest son Clarence was taken in as a ward by Theresa and her husband William Osborn Moore, who were otherwise childless. Theresa and Will lived three doors down on the same street, so Clarence was never far away from his mother and siblings. The big building full of people seems to have remained Mary Jane’s milieu until approximately 1906 (aside from times when she hired herself out at nearby ranches as a cook and laundress). By the end of that year, all of both Mary Jane’s and Nancy’s broods had fled the nest and there was no more need for the sisters to financially support their offspring. A great exodus of the Branson clan from Merced took place, with Nancy and all her kids moving northward into San Joaquin County. Mary Jane’s three all went to the San Francisco Bay Area. Southern Pacific -- the main employer in Merced -- needed lots of able-bodied men to help repair the company infrastructure after the great earthquake, and it appears that Clarence, George, and Bretelle’s husband Gifford M. Fowle, all took advantage of this opportunity. The term “appears” is used because Clarence and George are not specifically known to have worked for Southern Pacific, but it stands to reason that something brought them to the Bay Area at this juncture. Gifford M. Fowle is known to have been a Southern Pacific employee from his early teens until, with one interruption, his retirement many decades later, and family writings confirm he came to Berkeley in 1906 for the purpose of post-earthquake repair.

Mary Jane may have gone with her children to the Bay Area. She definitely accompanied Bretelle and Gifford when the Fowle household shifted in late 1906 or early 1907 to Redlands in San Bernardino County, though it is not clear whether Mary Jane lived in the home, or simply resided nearby. Mary Jane was therefore on hand for the birth of grandchild Gifford Benjamin Fowle (her second grandchild, after Clarence’s daughter Ruth) in November, 1907, and no doubt was of great help as a grandma-nanny. This arrangement was fairly brief, though. The 1910 census shows Bretelle, Gifford M., and Gifford B. Fowle living in Oakland. Mary Jane, once more a clerk in a drygoods store, is still in Redlands, living as a lodger with a female roommate.

Mary Jane apparently fell in love with southern California, and chose to reside there throughout her last four decades of life. Only the first years were spent in Redlands. After that, she lived in Los Angeles. The only exception was an interval in late 1919 and early 1920 when she lived with Bretelle again when the Fowle family was in Santa Barbara County. She appears as Mary J. Johnson, “mother-in-law” of householder Gifford in the 1920 census for the town of Santa Maria, working again as a clerk in a drygoods store. That census is somewhat deceptive about Gifford, however. He had completed night courses that allowed him to get a better position with Southern Pacific Railroad, and had gone to Oakland to take that job. Mary Jane’s presence was no doubt a result of Bretelle’s need to have someone to help look after her children, now three in number. The situation was temporary -- so temporary that today surviving child Esta Jane Fowle has no memory of her grandmother having lived with the family. Early in 1920 Bretelle and the kids moved north to rejoin Gifford, and Mary Jane went back to L.A.Family gossip hints that Bretelle may have briefly contemplated continuing to live separately, and that Mary Jane’s advice to her daughter about the difficulty of raising children on one’s own may have been timely.

What Mary Jane did for the final twenty-five years or so of her life is not well delineated, except that she remained remarkably independent for a female of her generation. The 1930 L.A. census shows her, at age sixty-seven, working as a live-in housekeeper. Surviving pictures give glimpses -- she appears in several photos from the 50th wedding anniversary of Alvin and Mary Branson, an event held in at Oak Park in Stockton in July 1930. (Mary Jane had been the bridesmaid at the wedding in 1880.) An early 1943 snapshot shows her at age eighty, holding the one-year-old daughter of her grandson George Bertrand Johnson, Jr. -- George was the only one of Mary Jane’s children or grandchildren known to reside in the Los Angeles area during that period.

From the vantage of the 21st Century and lacking any words she wrote, the greater part of what went on in Mary Jane’s mind and soul is occluded now. A bit of insight comes from a clipping she carried on her person for many years, a stanza written by G.K. Chesterton:

Mary Jane died 14 February 1949 in Los Angeles.

Children of Mary Jane Branson with Alonzo Diah Johnson

John Clarence Diah Johnson (Clarence Johnson)

George Bertrand Johnson

Alice Bretelle Johnson (Bretelle Johnson)

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