Grace Mildred
Branson
Grace Mildred Branson was born 15 August 1885
at the home of her parents, Joseph Branson and Ellen Margaret (Ella) Geary Branson. She was
the second and last girl of the six children raised on the ranch a few miles north
of Hornitos, CA. As a child, she was able to observe as gold ore was removed from the mines only
a few hundred yards away from the household’s front door.
Grace went to the local Quartzburg District School, sharing her classes with a student body made up almost entirely of relatives, be they named Branson or Peard or Simmons or Northrup or Spagnoli. Some were siblings, some were cousins also descended from her grandparents John Sevier Branson and Martha Jane Ousley. Some were more distant cousins decended from her grandfather's first cousins, Isaac Branson and Irena Branson Scott. Some were not blood relatives, but were members of families who had intermarried with the Branson clan.
Grace grew up tall and heavy-set. This, along with the exodus of young men from Mariposa County in the early 1900s due to the collapse of the gold-mining industry, meant she did not enjoy the attention of an abundance of suitors. She did not wait for one to magically appear, and instead became a school teacher. After graduating from Stockton Normal School, she taught close to home in Mariposa County at Bear Valley. (The image at right is a recent photograph of the historic Bear Valley schoolhouse. It is undoubtedly the same building Grace taught in.)
By 1908 she had taken a posting at Round Mountain
School in Fresno County. This, too, was a one-room rural schoolhouse situation. The facility,
nestled amid the rolling, wildflower-dotted hills along a small stream called Fancher Creek,
had been erected to serve the children of the ranchers living in and near the tiny trading post
of Academy. In this era before the area’s roads became paved and automobiles became common, the
nearest towns -- the sawmill community of Tollhouse farther into the hills, and the town of
Clovis out in the valley -- were too far off for the young pupils to commute to.
Accepting the job took Grace beyond the southern limits of the Mother Lode, and whether she intended it or not, uprooted her from her childhood milieu for good. In great part this was because she met her future husband while teaching at Round Mountain. A family from the Wisconsin/Illinois border named Warner had relocated to California in 1906 so that one of the grown sons of the family, Cullen, could benefit from the arid climate of the Great Central Valley, and hopefully stave off the tuberculosis he had been infected with, a disease which had already killed his young wife. Cullen’s parents John and Nellie Warner (John Warner and the former Eleanor Amelia Martin) had purchased a large property along Fancher Creek, where Cullen would be away from a town environment and less likely to infect others. Various family members lived at the ranch, including Cullen’s slightly younger brother, Albert Frederick Warner (born 13 August 1884 in Willow Springs, Howell County, MO).
Grace caught Bert Warner’s eye. At first, he could only lightly pursue that interest because he was one of Cullen’s main companions and caretakers, but Cullen succumbed to his case of TB at the beginning of May, 1909. Over the next couple of years, Bert gave up his bachelor cattle-ranching lifestyle and took a job as assistant manager of the feed grain warehouse and hardware store, Warner & Warner, that his father and his older brother, John Martin Warner, had founded twenty miles south of Academy in the town of Sanger, Fresno County, CA. Bert replaced his father, who was retiring from active co-management of the business. Soon the younger John Warner stepped away, too, in order to better care for his wife Anna, who was also dying of TB; he was replaced by Alie Spece, the husband of Bert’s sister Cora Belle. In the meantime, as it became clear to all that Bert was serious about remaining in his new occupation, he was accorded the grand salary of sixty dollars a month. This was enough that Bert was confident of his ability to support a family, and he proposed to Grace.
Grace gave up teaching upon her marriage. Ironically, she was
granted a lifetime certificate to teach at elementary school level in California that same year, 1911.
The formal paper arrived after she had turned her back on the occupation forever. She spent the rest
of her days as a homemaker.
The marriage took place 28 May 1911 in Fresno. After the wedding, bride and groom set out in a covered wagon pulled by two horses, and six days later arrived at their honeymoon location, Yosemite Valley. They camped for their two-week stay. Camping remained one of their favorite forms of recreation throughout their active years. This was particularly true of the period when they were raising their two daughters, Marian and Josephine, born during the World War I years. (Shown left, Grace and Bert and their two girls. Marian is the older child, Josie the tow-headed toddler confined to the makeshift playpen.) Both girls retained an affection for the Sierra Nevada. Marian would marry a foothills cattleman and reside just outside Tollhouse. Josie and her husband would camp and go on packtrips and, beginning in 1950, own a cabin at Huntington Lake.
Though Grace did not work outside the home as a wife, she was a member of the Yeoman and Rebekah Lodges. The decades of the 1920s and the 1930s, in spite of the uncertainties that came with the Great Depression, were prosperous times for the Warners. In 1919 Bert had bought out Alie Spece’s share of the warehouse, and had immediately added a gasoline service station to the property. This proved to be a stroke of genius as far as generating income for the family. Families were beginning to depend on automobiles and dispense with their horses, and the Warner service station was perfectly located within the town of Sanger. Things went so well, in fact, that Bert was able to retire from active business life in 1934, at age fifty. He self-mortgaged the sale of the station to a former employee, and he and Grace lived off the payments over the next twenty years. A paid-off home and other investments ensured their financial situation would remain comfortable after that. (Albert Frederick Warner is profiled on this website in the sections devoted to the family of his grandparents, Nathaniel Martin and Hannah Strader, and the family of his other grandparents, John Warner and Marancy Alexander. To read his biography, click here).
Grace and Bert enjoyed a long, easy span of
senior-citizenhood. They enjoyed good health, aside from the inconveniences of poor eyesight and
both carrying a large amount of weight. (Bert had been thin as a youth, and ultimately thinned out
again as a very old man, but was quite stout in middle age.) The improvement in the national highway
system by the middle of the 20th Century enticed the pair to do a great deal of travelling, even to
such far-flung spots as New England and Florida. Bert loved to visit his relatives back in Wisconsin
and Illinois, and observe the changes to the places he had known in his childhood. Grace never did
learn to drive, having come from a generation where ladies let husbands take care of such things.
This decision was also in keeping with her personality. She often felt comfortable keeping to
traditional modes of behavior.
In 1972, Grace had a scare when Bert suffered a severe heart attack. In the hospital, his doctors said he would not live to go back home. But he had always looked after Grace, and simply could not leave her to fend for herself. He did recover, and did come back home. Instead, it was Grace who was the first of the couple to die. She had already outlived all of her siblings -- even her six-years-younger brother Eldridge, who had made it to 1972 -- but in her late eighties, even her robust constitution failed her. In September, 1974, a severe stroke left her unable to communicate or care for herself. Bert had no choice but to admit her to the Sanger Convalescent Hospital, where she lasted only a few weeks. She succumbed 4 November 1974. She was laid to rest in the Warner section of the rural Mendocino Avenue Cemetery south of Sanger, beside Bert’s parents. Bert would join her there, but this would not occur for some time, despite his having reached ninety years of age before Grace’s final deterioration of health began. Various medications kept his heart problems in check, and he enjoyed a long, generally good twilight period as a popular patriarch of his clan. Bert actually survived for sixteen and a half years after his heart attack, and finally passed away 12 October 1988 at the age of one hundred four.
Children of Grace Mildred Branson with
Albert Frederick Warner
For genealogical details, click on
each of the names.
To go back one generation, click here. To return to Albert Frederick Warner’s page, click here. To return to the Branson/Ousley Family main page, click here.