Hugh McErlane Branson

Hugh McErlane Branson, second son and second child of Thomas Henry Ousley Branson and Frances Bauer, was born 24 April 1875 in Hornitos, Mariposa County, CA. (His death record indicates he was born in Merced. This is probably an error by the informant.) He was named in honor of family friend Hugh McErlane, a Gold Rush miner and merchant from Ireland who had worked beside the Branson and Bauer men, and who would continue to be an associate of the clan until his death in Merced in 1890 at age sixty-five. (For example, in the 1880s, Hugh McErlane was the business partner of Peter Harrington, husband of Nancy Anne Branson, in a liquor dealership in Merced.) In the 1870s, several of the boys of the Branson clan were named after friends of the family, most or all of those friends being lifelong bachelors like Hugh who would not otherwise have been able to pass their name down to another generation. It is somewhat ironic that the younger Hugh went on to be a lifelong bachelor himself, and failed to pass the name along any further.

Hugh was raised at the northern end of the small town of Hornitos. The house and garden were along the bank of Burns Creek, where Bear Valley Road makes its first turn. This setting was only a few miles south of the ranch owned by grandparents John and Martha Branson and another ranch owned by uncle Joseph Branson and wife Ella.

The family was stable and well settled for decades while Thomas Branson worked as a tinsmith, miner, and translator. It was a close-knit family. The 1900 census for Hornitos shows that all of Hugh’s siblings except Evalena (Lena) were still living at home, even though the oldest ones were well into their twenties and only the two youngest of the eight could be said to still be in the midst of childhood. Hugh was by then already twenty-four.

Hugh went into mining in the Hornitos area. This was a career that proved to be doomed. Hugh did not let go easily. Even while mines were failing all around the Mother Lode, he kept working. His name appears on claims transactions well into the early part of the 20th Century. His first cousin Ivan Branson mentioned in his writings decades later that Hugh was the very last of the large number of Branson men to work the Number Nine Mine near Quartzburg. Hugh did not give up on the occupation until the World War I era. His parents left Hornitos about 1912. Hugh probably moved shortly thereafter. (Hugh is shown still living in Hornitos in 1910, though by then he had moved a fraction of a mile away from his parents and was a boarder in a house owned by Ah Sing, his Chinese “uncle.”)

After the exodus, Hugh worked on Central Valley farms as a hired hand. Usually his employer and landlady was his sister Alice. That is to say, Hugh worked for Alice’s husbands, first for John Henry Williams and later for Milton James Henry. Hugh’s 1918 draft card shows that he was at that time working as a laborer for “J.H. Williams” at the latter’s Manteca-area farm. The 1930 census shows Hugh working less than a mile from there on the farm of Milton Henry -- and living on site as a boarder. However, Hugh did spend an interval in the early 1920s apart from his sister. The 1920 census (modern indexers have filed him under “McBranson,” not grasping that “Mc” was an abbreviation of his middle name) shows him in El Nido, Merced County, as a hired hand boarding with the family of Fred Rodrugu. That 1920 document further describes him as a carpenter.

In the 1930s and 1940s, as shown by voter registers, Hugh’s address continued to be the same as Alice’s, but it is likely he had quarters of his own elsewhere on the property. Eventually he may have come to own acreage in his own right, because his death certificate indicates he was self-employed. By then, he was a farmer of seed and poultry. There is no indication he resided anywhere other than Manteca during the last twenty years of his life. However, he did not die there. After suffering a heart attack in late October, 1949, he was admitted to Herrick Memorial Hospital in Berkeley. The choice of facility probably means that his sisters Inez and Alma took the responsibility of overseeing his care. (Their mutual home was by then just north of Berkeley.) Hugh lingered for six-and-a-half days until dying 5 November 1949 at the hospital. His body was interred in Stockton Rural Cemetery, Stockton, CA, in the cemetery where his parents and older brother and much of the family of his father’s brother Alvin Thorpe Branson had been, or eventually would be, laid to rest.

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