Ernest Elton Branson

Ernest Elton Branson, a twin of Eldridge, was born 4 September 1891 at the home of his parents, Joseph Branson and Ella Geary Branson. Along with Eldridge, he was the last of a brood of six children raised on the ranch a few miles north of Hornitos, CA, near the mining outpost of Quartzburg. As a boy, he was able to observe as gold ore was removed from the mines only a few hundred yards away from the household’s front door.

The veins of the Mother Lode were exhausted about the time Ernest came of age, collapsing the mining-based economy. With few prospects for employment, most of the region’s young men fled to more prosperous venues. Ernest stayed put -- literally living at home. His parents depended upon him to look after their stock -- the gold might have been gone, but the ranch was 1300 acres of grassy hills and it had long supported a substantial cattle herd. This work-and-lodging arrangement lasted until 1920. There was at least one interruption, however. The 22 June 1918 issue of the Mariposa Gazette reported that Ernest and another young man of Mariposa County, James Dulcich, had departed the previous Monday to enlist in the U.S. Navy. His gravemarker and other sources confirm he was accepted into the military, though into the Army, not the Navy. However, the war ended so soon after his induction it is unlikely he went overseas.

On the fifth of June of 1920 Ernest wed Alice Elizabeth Thistle. The wedding took place in Fresno, Fresno County, CA, but it was Mariposa County connections that had brought the pair together. Alice, a daughter of Oscar William Thistle and Elizabeth Euphemia Bedell, had been a resident of the Hornitos area for many years. Her older brother LeBaron Guy Thistle was the husband of Ernest’s sister Marguerite. Born 6 May 1893 in Victoria Corners, New Brunswick, Canada, Alice was somewhat of an old maid at age twenty-seven. She had been supporting herself as a teacher, first at the school in Quartzburg, and then in the period immediately preceding the marriage she had been on the faculty of a school in Kerman, Fresno County, CA.

Despite the Hornitos connection, the couple chose to make their home in Fresno County. They were soon settled in Kingsburg at the southern boundary of the county. During the early part of his thirty-five years in Kingsburg, Ernest was a mechanic, then spent a long interval employed by Zellerbach Paper Company of Fresno as a warehouseman.

Ernest and Alice had no children. Their surrogate kids were their three mutual nieces, Alice, Emily, and Imogene Thistle, the daughters of Guy and Marguerite. There was a symmetry to this arrangement, because Guy and Marguerite had both perished in the mid-1930s, and the girls needed parent figures as much as Ernest and Alice needed members of younger generations to cleave to. Ernest’s grand nieces still recall with fondness the excellent persimmon pudding with lemon sauce he would make for holiday gatherings. Ernest and Alice made Alice, Emily, and Imogene their main heirs, in part because due to Marguerite’s struggles with leukemia, the girls had not been left with a large inheritance upon their parents’ closely-spaced deaths. However, Ernest and Alice’s plan for their estate ran into difficulty as early as the end of the 1940s, as Ernest, to use his phrase, “wore out” early and took increasingly long interruptions from his employment. Alice began being plagued by arthritis, and her somewhat weak general constitution began catching up with her. Thus, despite having been a “dual income no kids” household, their financial wherewithal was not as robust as it might have been as their sixtieth birthdays slipped into history.

Alice never really got to enjoy her senior-citizen phase. She died 6 January 1956 at only sixty-two. This proved to be one of the great misfortunes of Ernest’s life, even more so than it normally would be, because his life was not structured well enough to leave him able to cope with the loneliness, and he needed the sense of purpose Alice had given to his existence. Given his circumstances, his alcoholic tendencies often got the better of him.

Upon becoming a widower, Ernest moved to Sanger, Fresno County, CA -- about ten miles north of Kingsburg -- to a neighborhood shared by his sister Grace (Mrs. A.F. Warner). His final years were less than ideal. His niece Josephine Warner Smeds in later decades vaguely recalled that Ernest married a gold-digger younger woman (whose name Josephine did not recall), who bilked him of what financial resources he had retained, and then left him. However, no marriage record has turned up. What is clear is that Ernest was destitute at the end of his life, apparently by his own doing. This included having spent the money generated by the sale of his twenty-percent legacy share of the Hornitos ranch to Horace Meyer, the rancher who was running cattle on the property and had earlier purchased another of the legacy shares from Ernest’s older brother John Joseph Branson. Ernest had given the deed into the keeping of his niece Imogene at one point, swearing that she keep it safe from him because it was meant for her and her sisters to inherit, but when he later came begging for it, she could not resist his pleas.

Ernest was completely alone at the end. His body was found a number of days after his death inside the backyard “mother-in-law” cottage he had been renting in Sanger. He was found on the evening of Monday, 16 October 1967. The last time he had been seen by others was the Friday evening, the 13th. It is unclear at what point during that seventy-two hour span he actually expired. The death date was recorded as the 16th. He was buried with Alice in Kingsburg Cemetery.

The postcard shown here was sent by Ernest to his new sister-in-law Clara Jackson Branson, wife of Eldridge, in the summer of 1914. Though Clara and Eldridge had been married for about nine months by then, she had apparently never seen Ernest, and wanted a photograph so as to see how much the twin brothers resembled each other. This card appeared on eBay in August 2006 and was spotted there by Clayton Guest, a descendant of John Sevier Branson’s cousin Irena Branson Scott, who alerted Dave Smeds to the auction. Dave was the only bidder and now owns the item. The seller was an antiques dealer who had probably acquired the postcard through a series of estate sales. The descendants of Eldridge and Clara had a pronounced tendency to die young and it is not surprising this heirloom would have slipped out of family possession.

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