Joseph William Branson

Joseph William Branson, the eldest child of John Sevier Branson, Jr. and Lillian Jane Guest, was born 8 December 1890 in the vicinity of Hornitos, Mariposa County, CA. He is not to be confused with his uncle Joseph Branson, nor with his father’s second cousin Joseph Russell Branson, both of whom resided in Hornitos for decades and share much of the same personal history -- Joseph William can be distinguished from them because he is a generation younger and only lived in Mariposa County when he was a baby and a toddler.

During his infancy Joseph and his parents lived at “Grasshopper Ranch,” the long-time home of his paternal grandparents John and Martha Branson. This property adjoined that of the Washington Mine at Quartzburg, a place where Joseph’s uncles had worked, and where his father may have been employed briefly as well. Grandpa John often made part of his living hauling goods, and John Jr. had learned this trade. By the end of 1892 or in early 1893, John Jr. began making his own wagon runs, choosing to do so in the hills of Madera County, farther south in the Mother Lode. The young family established a home at Raymond, a quarry town -- many of John Jr.’s loads consisted of cobblestones and granite blocks for the paving and construction of California’s rapidly growing towns and cities.

Joseph would spend the remainder of his childhood in Madera County, including the better part of a decade up in the hills. In addition to Raymond, the family may have also lived in Fresno Flats (now Oakhurst), Coarsegold, Hite’s Cove, and/or Sugar Pine, while John Jr.’s occupation shifted from teamster to saloonkeeper to lumberman. In the latter part of the year 1900 a job with Sugar Pine Lumber Company brought the household down to the town of Madera in the Central Valley, the endpoint of the sixty-mile-plus flume that carried the company’s logs to the main sawmill and shipping yard. The move introduced Joseph and his brother Henry to a considerably less rustic setting than they had known.

It was in Madera that Joseph met his bride-to-be. She was Mildred Lorrine King. A daughter of Charles Horace King and Ida Belle Ross, Mildred was from Irvine, Orange County, CA (in those days, it was known as Irvine Ranch). The eldest of four children, she had been born 16 March 1895. In May of 1911 at age sixteen she had been in an automobile accident that claimed the lives of her father and her nine-year-old brother Roscoe. Mildred had been lying down in the back seat and was not killed, but she was left emotionally shaken by the trauma and tragedy and readily agreed to accept the invitation of a friend, Ora Phillips, to come north to Madera to “get away” for a while. She and Joseph met and their courtship proceeded swiftly. The couple were married 20 April 1912 in Madera. (Their wedding photo is shown slightly below at right.) The event took place only a few days after Mildred’s seventeenth birthday. In those days, a bride had to be eighteen to marry without obtaining parental permission, so she wrote the number eighteen on a piece of paper and slipped it into her shoe. When the clerk asked her if she was “over eighteen,” she was able to truthfully say yes. (As well as anyone today can determine, she had her mother’s blessing, but getting her mother’s signature would have required delaying the ceremony until her mother could make arrangements to come up from Orange County.)

About the time Mildred actually was eighteen, she and Joseph were eagerly anticipating the birth of their first child. Unfortunately it proved to be a tubal pregnancy. Mildred needed urgent surgery -- and nearly died during the operation. In the midst of the procedure, the surgeon realized he did not know how to cope with the complications that were manifesting. He summoned another physician from across the street. Thanks to the competence of this second doctor, whose name was Don Ransom, Mildred’s life was saved. Unfortunately, Dr. Ransom was forced to remove her uterus, an ovary, and part of another ovary. The only reason the rest of the second ovary was not taken out was that the common medical wisdom at the time dictated that a woman be left with at least part of an ovary or she would go insane -- a primitive understanding of the role of estrogen on a woman’s mental health. (A tangential note: Some twenty years after this dramatic surgery, Joseph’s little sister Dorothy, who had only been six years old at the time of the event, would as the bride of John Oscar Radley, Jr. move into a house that by chance was situated right next door to the home of Dr. Ransom.)

Mildred was left incapable of bearing children. This was a huge blow. She and Joseph were well-suited to being parents and had been greatly looking forward to the experience. A decade later a solution would present itself. Meanwhile, Joseph’s means of supporting his wife was to, like his father, work for Sugar Pine Lumber Company. The firm would remain his employer through the mid-1920s. His World War I draft card describes his occupation as yard foreman at the company facility in Madera. (The card also indicates he was exempt from the draft because he had undergone some sort of surgery -- the handwriting is not easily decipherable. It is worth mentioning that registrars would often willingly exaggerate medical conditions in order to ensure that friends would not be shipped overseas. Joseph had undergone surgery to remove a carbuncle from the back of his neck, and this had left him with a large scar. This infirmity might not have kept him out of the Army if the war had gone on, but it would have been inaccurate to state on the card that he had no medical blemishes at all.)

The couple’s home for well over a decade was at 500 Vineyard Avenue in Madera. It was a settled phase in their lives. Though bereft of progeny, Joseph and Mildred were able to dote upon nieces and nephews. These included Beverly and Betty Branson, the children of Henry, who had special need for a father figure after Henry was killed in a sawmill accident in April, 1921. As if to balance this tragedy, fortune smiled on Joseph and Mildred in the early summer of 1923. Mildred’s mother Ida Belle Ross King, still residing down in Orange County, was a “practical nurse” (these days we would call this an L.V.N.), working on a fill-in basis for various local physicians. As a result of meeting a variety of patients, she became aware of a teenage unwed mother in Huntington Beach who was coming under increasing pressure from her family to rid herself of her embarrassing little “problem.” Ida spoke to the teenager about letting the baby be adopted by Joseph and Mildred. The young mother, reluctant though she was to let the baby go, understood her situation. She chose Joseph and Mildred over another set of candidates because the other people already had offspring. The teenager had grown up in a household with twelve older half-siblings and had not enjoyed being so out-numbered and so “different” than the others. She wanted her baby to be first in line in her adoptive parents’ affection. With the agreement made, Ida took custody of the five-week-old infant. Joseph and Mildred drove down to Ida’s home in Irvine in their Model T -- it was a full-day trek from Madera in that pre-freeway era -- and fetched their new daughter. They named her Lowell Lorrine Branson, the first name taken from a character in a book Mildred had enjoyed in childhood. Wanting Lowell to grow up as confident of herself as possible, Joseph insisted she never be told that she had been adopted. He would go to his crypt decades later believing the truth had never come out.

When Lowell was small, Joseph was transferred to other positions with Sugar Pine Lumber Company. First the family moved from their longterm home at 500 Vineyard Avenue to Pinedale (a place now on the northern outskirts of the city of Fresno), then came a bigger move up to the company operations in the mountains at Sugar Pine itself. Joseph supervised at the mill and oversaw the trafficking of logs from the pond down the flume. (Shown just below left is Sugar Pine Flume #12. This photograph, made into a postcard, dates from the time when it served Joseph and his crew.) The family remained at Sugar Pine for about a year, then a new opportunity arose. Henry Branson’s widow Ada Crane had married second husband Matthew J. Huddleston and settled with him in San Francisco. Matt had worked for many years hauling goods, starting back when it required wagons drawn by horses, oxen, or mules. Matt was then running a trucking service and was able to give Joseph a job. Apparently the occupation was not as appealing as Joseph had hoped, and soon he, Mildred, and Lowell were back in Madera. They lodged for some months, or perhaps a full school term, with John and Lillian Branson. As the end of the decade grew near, Joseph and Mildred decided that a home near her kin was a good place to start a new life. They moved to Santa Ana, CA. Joseph found a job with the Santa Ana Lumber Company.

Santa Ana Lumber Company was one of the businesses hit hard by the arrival of the Great Depression. Joseph was laid off in late 1929 and was left scrambling to find other work. There weren’t a lot of jobs to be found because so many people were in the same situation. However, this was Orange County, named so because it was so replete with orange groves. Mildred knew that an old classmate of hers from her school days at Irvine Ranch was operating an orange packing plant in Tustin. She used this connection to land jobs for herself and Joseph there. Mildred worked on the conveyor belt with the other women, grading and sizing the fruit and packing it in boxes. Joseph stacked the full boxes onto the trucks. She was paid nine dollars a week; he was paid twelve. These were six-day weeks. Not only was this arduous in and of itself, but Mildred found the constant movement of the conveyor belt triggered migraine headaches. She had to quit.

To make up for the lost income, the couple decided to sign up with the county as official foster parents. The children they took in were only temporary occupants of their home -- generally no more than a year or so -- and none were ever formally adopted as Lowell had been, but Joseph and Mildred were finally able to enjoy a sense of having a big family of kids. They continued to house wards of the county throughout the Great Depression. The 1930 census shows one such occupancy arrangement. Residing at the house on the survey date were Russell Burchfield, age ten, and siblings Betty V. Hartwich, age seven, and Harold Hartwich, age one year eight months. It was the presence of these foster children that inadvertently led to Lowell discovering she was adopted. A young cousin who knew of the adoption mentioned it in the presence of little Betty Hartwich, who the next day asked Mildred about it while Lowell was in hearing range. Mildred knew Joseph wanted the secret kept and managed to avoid actually answering the question by addressing the topic in a general way, saying that adopted (and foster) children were just as good as natural children and not to be made fun of. However, she had always felt it was better that Lowell know the truth, and having seen how the truth might come out in an abrupt and potentially negative way, she sat Lowell down the next day and explained her origin. Mildred made Lowell swear never to reveal to her father that she was aware of the circumstances. (Naturally Lowell became curious about her birth parents. Much later in life, when Joseph and Mildred had passed away, Lowell enlisted the help of her husband, who was a private investigator for a law firm, and obtained the adoption records. She never met her birth mother, but she did succeed in identifying the woman, and eventually did make contact with a number of her blood relatives.)

In the mid-1930s Joseph and Mildred welcomed a pair of boys who stayed half a decade or so, the longest term by far of any of the foster children they cared for. These were brothers Wayne and Dean Duncan, the elder being two years younger than Lowell, the other four. An enduring bond formed. Joseph and Mildred were the parents that Wayne and Dean wrote letters home to while they served in World War II. They always cited Joseph and Mildred as the best of all their foster parents. Aside from that wartime service, they spent their lives residing close at hand in Orange County. (Aaron Wayne Duncan was born 16 August 1925 and died 8 May 2003. Gale Dean Duncan was born 23 June 1927 and died 5 June 1994.)

As the Depression eased, Santa Ana Lumber Company was able to re-hire Joseph. He was assigned to cabinet making, a skill he came to excel at. Mildred devoted herself to foster care with diligence and joy. Together the couple lived out their lives in Orange County. Joseph died 8 August 1955 at less than sixty-five years of age. His remains were placed in a mausoleum (Acacia Crypts) at Melrose Abbey in Orange, CA. Mildred survived him by a few years, passing away 29 November 1961. Her death locale was Atwater, Merced County, CA. This does not mean she had changed her place of residence. She had come north for the wedding of Joseph’s niece Dona Stefanelli, the daughter of his younger sister Dorothy, and was spending a few days visiting Ada Crane Branson Huddleston when she abruptly succumbed. Her body was also laid to rest at Melrose Abbey.

Child of Joseph William Branson with Mildred Lorrine King

Lowell Lorrine Branson

For genealogical details, click on Lowell’s name.

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