Irene Anne Harrington

Irene Anne Harrington, daughter of Nancy Anne Branson and Peter Harrington, was born 5 November 1886 in Merced, Merced County, CA. She was often known by her middle name, and more familiarly as Annie.

Irene’s father died not long after her third birthday, leaving her mother a widow with six children to support. Nancy dealt with the challenge by combining forces with her sister Mary Jane Branson Johnson, who had also lost her husband. The two women ran a boarding house in Merced. Nancy was the housekeeper and cook, while Mary Jane handled laundry after working shifts as a clerk at a drygoods store. Irene and her siblings, along with Mary Jane’s youngest two children, lived at that boarding house until they came of age. Mary Jane’s eldest son, Clarence Johnson, lived next door as a ward of Theresa Branson Moore and her husband Will Moore.

In the latter half of the 1890s Nancy married John James Napier, known as “Babe” Napier. He would remain Irene’s stepfather thereafter, though it does not appear he was heavily involved with the raising of the Harrington children, and was often gone on mining expeditions, including at least one trip to the gold fields of Alaska.

All of Nancy Anne’s daughters married early. Irene may have been the very last (depending on the precise date of her sister Nina’s wedding, which has not yet been pinned down), and in doing so at nearly twenty, became a wife at an older age than any of her sisters except Elsie, who wed at twenty-two. Irene’s bridegroom was Claude Devere Salmon. The ceremony took place 3 October 1906, probably in Manteca. By this point, the Harrington/Napier family had all moved out of Merced, and the boarding house was a thing of the past. Manteca and the farmland around it was the clan’s main base of operations.

Claude, whose middle name appears in various records as Devere, de Vere, and De Vere, was substantially older than Irene, having been born 14 October 1877 in California. The Salmon family were among the prominent pioneering folk of the Manteca area, and were associated with the families of Irene’s brothers-in-law Otis Cowell and Winfred Converse. The Salmons, Cowells, and Converses had all been part of a large migration of settlers from southwest Wisconsin to San Joaquin County. Claude’s grandfather Luther Salmon had been one of the first white men to settle in Grant County, WI, having fought in the Black Hawk Wars that forced out the last of the Indians in the early 1830s. Otis was the son of Joshua Cowell, a man considered to be the founder of Manteca. The marriages of sisters Elsie, Eunice, and Irene to heirs of Manteca’s established landowners meant that the bond to Manteca was particularly strong over the coming decades, and some descendants still live in the vicinity. Only a handful of relatives continued to reside back in Merced, all of those being connected to Nancy’s late sister Phoebe Ann Branson McDonald.

Eunice and Win Converse, and Elsie and Otis Cowell, would live out their lives in Manteca. Irene and Claude would spend the better part of twenty years there. In the early part of this period the couple’s two children, Wanda and Jack, were born. Claude’s mother (the former Sophronia Sperry of Wisconsin, born 1846) was part of the household. A widow, Sophronia and Claude had shared a house next door to that of Joshua Cowell for a number of years prior to Claude and Irene’s courtship.

Eventually Claude, who had been a farmer in his youth, found work as a truck driver with Spreckels Sugar Company, a major employer of central California. At first he was able to work from Manteca. His World War I draft card shows him with that occupation, and the family still in Manteca, as of 12 September 1918. By the 1 January 1920 census, the family had moved to a home a bit closer to the Sierra foothills, but still in the greater Manteca vicinity.

Claude continued to be a truck driver well into the 1920s, but changes manifested in the middle of the decade. The following article, from the 13 August 1926 edition of the Modesto News-Herald describes one of the precipitating events:

MANTECA, Aug. 12 -- (Special) -- Found lying alongside the state highway, C.D. Salmon of this city, employed as a field man by the Spreckels Sugar company, lies seriously ill in a hospital at Sacramento. X-Ray pictures will be taken in order to determine the cause of the illness. He started for his home here Saturday and was taken ill just a short distance from Sacramento, where he was found lying by the side of the highway by C.F. Wampler, a fellow employee, also of Manteca, who took him to a hospital and notified Mrs. Salmon. She visited the hospital yesterday, with the hope of bringing him home, but physicians in charge refused to let him leave until they made a further examination.

C.F. Wampler, mentioned in the article above, may have been (or would soon become) the son-in-law of Irene’s cousin Clarence Johnson. Just what happened to Claude is not addressed in family notes. He lived nearly fourteen more years, but it could be that the incident had health ramifications. He was no longer a driver, but a field superintendent, and it could be the stress of his responsibilities, as well as the regular commute from Manteca to his employer’s vast sugar beet plantations in the heart of the Sacramento delta, had pushed him beyond his limit. He and Wanda must have agreed that some sort of adjustment was needed. The answer was to give up the commute. The couple left the Manteca area for good. Their home for the remainder of their days was smack dab in the very heart of Spreckels’s main holdings. That place was Woodland, Yolo County, CA.

The year of 1926 brought one other big change to Irene and Claude’s lives. Late in the year, their daughter Wanda, having abandoned her plan to become a children’s nurse, married Charles William Patrie. Some four years later the two would produce a son. (Shown at right is Irene holding her new grandson.) It was not until some time after the wedding and Wanda’s departure from the household that Irene and Claude made the move to Woodland. Wanda and her husband moved to Yolo County at about the same time, though they established themselves in the unincorporated town of Riverbank rather than in Woodland.

As a consequence of the relocation, Jack Wesley Salmon met a young woman named Daisy Catherine Lynn. Their romance proceeded with alacrity, resulting in a wedding in the spring of 1928. This means Jack became a spouse at an even younger age than Wanda, who at least had waited until a few days after she had turned nineteen. Jack came to the altar at seventeen. Jack did not move out until the early 1930s, though. The 1930 census shows him and his bride sharing the house with Irene and Claude. Jack also did not hurry into parenthood. Like Wanda, his firstborn did not arrive until 1931.

Also in the household in 1930 was Winfred Converse. Win and Eunice had found their farm income insufficient to get by as the nation entered the Great Depression. (Medical debts may have exacerbated their circumstances.) Win had accepted a job with Spreckels -- a position that Claude may have helped him obtain -- and was boarding with the Salmons. Meanwhile Eunice remained back in the Converse family home while working in Manteca as a retail clerk.

Irene and Claude -- as well as Jack -- remained in Woodland the rest of their lives. Claude died 1 August 1940. Irene passed away 29 April 1966. Her demise took place at the end of a period spent in a convalescent home with Alzheimer’s Disease.

Irene, center, is shown standing with her sisters Elsie Margaret Harrington Cowell, left, and Mary Josephine Harrington McDonald Baysinger, right. The elderly woman sitting in front is Nancy Anne Branson Harrington Napier. This is another of the “new baby of the family” photographs from 1931, taken on the same afternoon and in the same place as the one reproduced above right.

Children of Irene Anne Harrington with Claude Devere Salmon

Wanda May Salmon

Jack Wesley Salmon

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