Gertrude Branson

Gertrude Branson, daughter of Reuben Branson and Eliza Louisa Armstrong, made an exciting entry into the world. The family was living in the logging community of Sugar Pine, in the Grub Gulch area of Madera County, high in the mountains when Louisa went into labor. Complications developed. A doctor was needed. Unfortunately, the nearest available doctor was in the town of Madera, down in the Central Valley, over sixty-five miles away. The only means of transport that would give mother and baby the quickest and best care was to ride the Gertrude Flume, down which logs were sent to be milled into lumber. Reuben and Louisa climbed into a makeshift vehicle -- a log cut into a triangular shape, with only eyebolts to hang on to -- and clung to it during a frightening ride downslope. Somehow they made it safely to their destination. The child was born healthy 22 January 1891, and was given the name Gertrude in honor of the flume. She was often known as Gertie.

Gertie in turn may have inspired the name of the Gertrude Mine in the Potter Ridge area, one of several Madera and Mariposa mines that her father worked over the rest of the 1890s. Gertie spent her early childhood in cabins near mines and sawmills of the mountains. The most long-lasting of these homes was in the quarry town of Raymond in Madera County. This phase of her life lasted until 1900, when Reuben took a job with the Yellow Aster Mining Company in Indian Wells Valley in eastern Kern County. A home was established in Randsburg. The household included Gertie and probably all four of her sisters. Her older brother Robert moved to the region as well after a short interval lingering in the Mother Lode.

Reuben and Louisa separated and then divorced in the first few years of the 20th Century. Gertie lived with her mother for the remainder of her childhood. This means she was undoubtedly along for the ride when Louisa reestablished herself in the San Francisco Bay Area (perhaps right in the city of San Francisco, but more likely in San Jose), and began operating a boarding house in order to support herself and the youngest of her offspring. It is not quite clear how long these circumstances lasted, but some time before 1910 Louisa and children Mabel, Mamie, Gertie, and Herbert (born 1903) came south to Los Angeles County. Of the kids, only Herbert was residing with Louisa by the time of the census of 1910, but the others are believed to have had homes relatively close by.

It is not quite known what Gertie did with herself in early adulthood, except that she must have lived in the oil towns of eastern L.A. County -- Tropico being one site mentioned in notes. In 1915 she married Jesse (also known as Jess and as Jessie) M. Smith. Jesse had been born 24 October 1866 in California. His parentage has not fully been discovered, but his mother’s maiden name was McDowell, and McDowell is quite likely to be what the middle initial “M” in his own name stood for. As a young man he had lived in San Francisco and the Salinas Valley, and then had become a Kern County oil man. He and Gertie may have first encountered each other during his Kern County years, but probably they met when he relocated to Los Angeles County after 1910. He was twenty-four years older than Gertie. His age was no doubt the main reason why they had no children, even though Gertie was still in the early part of her potential childbearing years at the time of the wedding. Also, Jesse had already sired a son and daughter with his first wife Elizabeth Florence Carnahan, and had just completed the raising of these two when his relationship with Gertie began.

Gertie and Jesse lived as renters in the main part of the city of Los Angeles in the late 1910s and early 1920s. By 1924, they purchased a home on Walnut Drive in Florence, Los Angeles County. This move coincided with a job change, as Jesse decided he had had enough of running oil wells (which he may have done as an investor or even as an outright owner) and downsized to being the owner and operator of a service station. He was fast approaching sixty years of age and the new occupation was more in keeping with his level of energy. The business represented a nice bit of security as the Great Depression dawned. People needed gasoline even in tough times.

Jesse died 12 February 1942. The California Death Index shows the death occurred in Los Angeles County, which probably means in Florence or the nearest hospital. Gertie and Jess are thought to have remained at their home on Walnut Drive through the final phase of his life -- certainly they were still there in 1936, as shown in that year’s voter register. Gertie probably remained in the same house for quite some time as a widow. Eventually, however, she moved to Long Beach, where it was easier for her brother Herbert to look in on her and make sure she was all right. She died in that city 13 March 1963. Her remains were interred six days later at Inglewood Park Cemetery, Inglewood, CA.

Gertie, who was known after marriage as Gertrude B. Smith (“B” for Branson), is not to be confused with Gertrude Ellen Branson, the daughter of her first cousin John Joseph Branson.

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