John Sevier
Branson, Jr.
John Sevier
Branson, Jr., fifth son and ninth child
of John Sevier Branson and Martha Jane Ousley, was born 20 May 1868 at Phillips Flat, Mariposa
County, CA, a mining outpost along the Merced River. Phillips Flat no longer exists; the site
was covered by water in the 20th Century when the erection of the Exchequer Dam created Lake
McClure.
The Branson family had been living at Phillips Flat for almost a decade. The gravel beds had produced a worthwhile amount of gold during that time, but were becoming depleted enough that John Sr. decided he might have better luck in his old prospecting territory in the Trinity Mountains in northernmost California. Soon after John Jr.’s birth the family picked up stakes, loaded into the Conestoga wagon that had brought John Sr. west from Missouri in 1849 and headed up the length of the Sacramento Valley.
The gold deposits in the Trinity area proved to be as exhausted as in the Mother Lode. The family quickly moved on into Oregon, having decided to become a farm household in the Willamette Valley. Martha found the Pacific Northwest climate too wet for her taste, so in 1869 back the family came to Mariposa County. John Sr. bought a ranch a few miles north of Hornitos, near the mining outpost of Quartzburg, adjoining the properties of the Washington mine. There he raised cattle and feed, prospecting only occasionally as a sideline, hauling freight when he needed to earn cash money. The couple resided on the property, called Grasshopper Ranch, for the rest of their lives. The final child, Mattie, John Jr.’s only younger sibling, was born there in 1870. The youngest half-dozen of the ten Ousley/Branson children grew to regard the place as the home at which they had been raised. This was particularly true of John Jr. and Mattie.
John Jr. attended Quartzburg school, and as a teenager no doubt helped his father cut hay, tend the ranch’s horses and cattle, and haul commercial loads. The latter occupation seemed to appeal to John Jr. He did not concentrate his ambitions on mining as had his brothers Reuben and Alvin. He set his sights on acquiring a large wagon and team of draft animals of his own.
John Jr. married Lillian Jane Guest 15 January 1890 in Merced, CA. He no doubt had known her for years because her older brothers worked at the Washington Mine. Lillian was a daughter of John William Guest, Sr. and Elizabeth Tracy. Lillian had been born 24 December 1872 in Bear Valley, CA, where her parents had settled in 1859. (John Guest was born in England about 1829 and came to Ohio in about 1850, where he worked as a miner. He met Elizabeth there and married her at Athens, OH in 1853. The first three of their children were born in Ohio; Lillian was one of the seven younger children born in Mariposa County.) For the rest of 1890 John Jr. and Lillian resided at Grasshopper Ranch. Their first child, Joseph, was born there in December.
Soon John Jr. cut the apron strings. The voter registration roll of 1892 shows him still in Hornitos as of October, 1892, but within twelve months of that date, he and Lillian and little Joseph relocated to Raymond, Madera County, farther south in the Mother Lode. Second son Henry was born at the latter locale in September, 1893. It was probably some time in the next few years that a pregnancy resulted in either a late miscarriage or a stillbirth. Family records are not robust enough to be certain the event took place. If it did, the child was probably never given a name.
While the family lived at Raymond, John Jr. made his living by hauling supplies, taking the necessities of life uphill for the miners and loggers there, and bringing downhill such material as cobblestones from the large granitie quarries of the region -- during the turn of the century cobblestones were still a common type of street paving, regularly needed.
Among the more colorful aspects of John Jr.’s occupation is that shipment wagons such as his were the means of transportation for the ladies of the night who worked the Mother Lode. These women would travel from mining camp to logging site to mill, plying their trade in a circuit. They were not permitted aboard the stage coaches that operated between the major junctions, and like Chinese and black citizens had to depend on less conspicuous modes of travel. From the vantage point of the 21st Century it is impossible to know what John Jr. thought of this situation. It is appealing to imagine he enjoyed not only the extra income contributed by his passengers, but appreciated having people of all backgrounds perched behind his bench or seated beside him, sharing stories, news, and jokes with him, and no doubt making fun of the authority figures of the day. Perhaps the friendships gleaned during those trips led to his employment as a saloonkeeper (the occupation cited on an 1898 list of registered voters of Madera County).
Perhaps he had turned to saloonkeeping because hauling by wagon was such hard work, and well as a dying career at a time when railroad extensions were penetrating deeper into the mountains. John Jr. found a more secure and settled job when he accepted a position with the Sugar Pine Lumber Company. This major operation harvested trees in the High Sierra at Sugar Pine, milled them into lumber and shorter logs there, and sent the resulting wood down a sixty-three-mile-long flume to Madera in the Central Valley, where the product was offered to local builders or was shipped off to various destinations via Southern Pacific Railroad. (The flume was no doubt the same one that had played such a dramatic role in the birth of John Jr.’s brother Reuben’s daughter Gertrude in 1891. See Reuben’s and Gertrude’s pages in this archive for details.) John Jr.’s position allowed him to work at the downhill end of the flume. He and Lillian established a home in Madera in 1900 and lived in that community for the rest of their lives. Much or all of that time was spent at a residence on Washington Avenue.
In 1907 the couple’s final child, Dorothy, was born. Dorothy would reside in Madera her whole life. Having her near at hand was no doubt a comfort to her parents in their declining years. By contrast, their eldest son Joseph would move to Orange County in the late 1920s, and they would lose Henry well before they themselves passed away. Henry, age twenty-seven, was working as a foreman at the Yosemite Lumber Company at Merced Falls, Madera County when he was killed 11 April 1921. As reported in the 16 April issue of the Mariposa Gazette, Henry’s overcoat became entangled in the pulley and belt mechanism of a planing mill, which caused him to be thrown violently to the floor. He died two hours later of the resulting brain hemorrhage.
Henry left two surviving children, son Beverly Orwin Branson, age three, and an infant daughter, Betty. His widow Ada (Crane) sought the comfort and shelter of both her own relatives and John and Lillian. These three were enough of a fixture in John and Lillian’s lives during the mid-1920s that when the house on Washington Avenue was consumed in a fire and had to be rebuilt from scratch, the couple decided to erect an addition connected by a short causeway in which the grandchildren and their widowed mother could live. Even after Ada married Matthew Huddleston (in about 1926) and made a home with him in San Francisco, Beverly and Betty -- sometimes with and sometimes without their mother -- continued to be frequent visitors, keeping the family bond intact despite the loss of Henry. Beverly was there enough that it was Madera High School from which he graduated, and at age eighteen (in 1939) Betty moved in full-time for a couple of years, and it during that phase of her life that she met Bert Smith, the man she would marry (in 1941). After Matt Huddleston’s death in 1947, Ada would return to the nearby parts of the Central Valley, settling in Winton, Merced County, CA, near Atwater.
After leaving the lumber company job, John worked for the Madera Department of Public Works. He was in charge of maintaining the street-sweeping equipment (changing the brushes, etc.). He kept this job until late in life.
Lillian died 11 September 1944, leaving John a widower. Dorothy and Betty looked after him over the next half-dozen years.
John Jr. was the last of his generation to pass away, doing so 27 February 1951 in Madera. Like so many Bransons, he is buried in Arbor Vitae Cemetery.
Children of John Sevier Branson, Jr. with
Lillian Jane Guest
For genealogical details, click on
each of the names.