Alexander Hamilton Branson

Alexander Hamilton Branson, youngest son of Thomas Henry Ousley Branson and Frances Bauer, was born 29 January 1888 in Hornitos, Mariposa County, CA. In adulthood he was often known as Alex.

Alex was raised in Hornitos in a house and garden along the bank of Burns Creek, at a spot where the Bear Valley Road made its first turn. (The garden is given special mention because it was so ample. Frances’s father Egide Bauer had been well known in the community as a vegetable grower and his daughter kept the tradition alive.) This setting was only a few miles from the ranch owned by grandparents John and Martha Branson and another ranch owned by uncle Joseph Branson and wife Ella. The household was stable and well settled for decades while Alex’s father worked as a miner, tinsmith, translator, and employee of the local courthouse. It was a close-knit family, with the majority of the children lingering into their twenties or even, in the case of eldest son William Proctor Branson, never leaving home at all. The first members of the brood did not depart to begin independent lives until Alex was on the brink of being a teenager, even though some were much older than he.

As he himself became old enough to venture into the world it was only natural that Alex took up mining. However, by the time he was in his early twenties the local gold-extraction industry collapsed. By 1910, even while still in Hornitos, he was doing odd jobs as an alternative. By 1912, he was employed at the Mariposa/Merced County boundary at the huge sawmill at Merced Falls. The move there was his first step as part of the entire-family exodus from Hornitos to nearby parts of the Central Valley. His parents had at last given up the home on Burns Creek, where they had resided for forty years, so Alex did not have the option of simply turning around.

During the mid-1910s, Alex found employment in a variety of ways, including as a farm laborer. Soon he was in Stockton, San Joaquin County, where various relatives had settled. There he became a bus driver, a type of occupation that had only recently come into existence. Driving seems to have inspired him to start a delivery business. The World War I draft card of his first cousin Arthur Ervin Bauer states that Arthur was at that time (September, 1918) working as an expressman -- or delivery driver -- for Alex. However, this venture does not appear to have been profitable, because the following spring Alex went to work as a farm hand in Merced County for, and on the acreage of, R.R. Phillips.

Alex died 24 September 1919 when a wisdom tooth extraction site went septic. He was in Richmond, Contra Costa County, CA at the time, having gone there for dental/medical treatment. His sister Alma Branson Youd had become a Richmond resident, as had other relatives, including his maternal uncle Michael Bauer. Their presence is probably why Alex chose that locale to undergo oral surgery -- or perhaps he was visiting kin when his jaw grew so painful and/or infected he was forced to have the extraction done before returning to his normal haunts. His obituary in the Merced Sun confirms he had still been an employee of R.R. Phillips in the period leading up to his death.

Alex only reached thirty-one years of age. Like the other sons of Thomas Branson and Frances Bauer, he did not marry and did not have children. He was buried 25 September 1919 in Stockton Rural Cemetery, where his mother and brother William had been laid to rest three years earlier.

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