Mary Jane “Mamie” Branson

Mary Jane Branson, the third child and first daughter of Reuben Branson and Louisa Armstrong, was born 8 November 1877 in Mariposa County in or near one of the spots in the hills where her father was employed. The location would have been either near the McCabe or Chase Mine gold mines, or near the lumber operations at Hite’s Cove. Mary Jane, known lifelong as Mamie, is not to be confused with her father’s sister, Mary Jane Branson Johnson.

Mamie grew up in the hills along with many brothers and sisters, the family’s home shifting as her father worked different claims, in particular those in the Potter Ridge Mining District of Mariposa County and the Grub Gulch region of Madera County. The longest-term home was in the quarry town of Raymond, Madera County, through much of the 1890s.

Mamie was somewhat crippled. Two stories survive among family lore to explain the infirmity. One tale is that she contracted polio as a child. The other is that as an adolescent she fell and dislocated a hip. This accident occurred when she was working as a servant in a home. Her employers were Christian Scientists, and when Mamie tripped and came down hard on a brick hearth, they would not summon a doctor because doing so was against their beliefs. The injury was ignored until proper healing became impossible, leaving one leg permanently shorter than the other. The latter story is considered more likely to be true because Mamie led an active life as an adult, carrying a full workload, and she is often seen standing in photographs. In short, though her body had been damaged, she still had command over it. However, her condition may explain why she never had children.

Mamie was an adult by the turn of the century, when her parents moved to Randsburg in easternmost Kern County. She had the option of remaining behind in the gold country, but she appears to have joined the migration. Then, when her mother and sisters went on to the San Francisco Bay Area, she appears to have stayed in the Mojave Desert, probably for reasons of courtship and romance. In about 1904, she married a railroad worker named William Emmett Dougherty. A son of Lemuel and Maggie Dougherty, Emmett was more than eight years younger than Mamie, having been born 19 December 1885 in Kansas (probably in Coffey County, where his parents and older siblings Samuel and Sarah appear in the 1880 census). He had come west as a youngster. He appears in the 1900 census for Needles Township, San Bernardino County, CA as a fifteen-year-old (his birth year is given as 1884 in that source) dwelling with his sister Sarah and brother-in-law Christopher Charles Reardon and working as a “call boy.” Mamie was apparently sensitive to the extreme difference in their ages and told everyone she was only a year older than he. In this, she was just like her mother and her sisters Mabel and Margaret, who drastically “adjusted” their reported ages downward while married to younger men.

Mamie and Emmett moved about quite a bit during their years together, and given that they left no descendants to tell their story, the picture of their married life is not entirely in focus, but public records confirm at least this much: The couple remained in the desert until 1909 or early 1910. Emmett continued to work as a railroad engineer. Given that there were no children to tie Mamie to a home setting, she may have accompanied her husband some of his runs, but chances are high she stayed behind, meaning she spent a large portion of each week and/or month almost as a single woman. The home may have been at first in Needles, but soon it was in Barstow, San Bernardino County.

By 1910, Emmett apparently gave up his railroad career for good, though there is a chance he resumed it for a period in the next few years. He and Mamie relocated to a farm in Fresno County, CA. (The 1910 census curiously describes this as a “round house” farm.) The pair probably remained in Fresno for a very brief time. They could not have stayed longer than seven years, because the 1917-1918 voter register and Emmett’s 1918 draft card shows that he and Mamie were by then back in San Bernardino County, residing in Atolia, a very small community located slightly south and east of Randsburg. Randsburg had continued to be where Mamie’s brother Robert E. Lee Branson was based, though he departed in about 1917, and Mamie’s mother Louisa and little brother (perhaps actually a nephew) Herbert Raymond Branson had moved, or were just about to move, back to that town. This meant Mamie had kin living near her for what may have been the first time since she had become a married woman. She would never again be widely separated from members of her immediate family.

Emmett is described on the draft card as a miner, but this was another temporary occupation. By the late 1910s, mining had become a difficult way to make a living in the southern half of California. It’s not surprising he shifted to one of the region’s mainstay sources of employment -- he became an oil worker. He and Mamie moved to Taft, Kern County, CA, probably arriving in the late summer or early fall of 1920. Taft had just become home to Mamie’s sister Margaret and brother-in-law Jack Cowsert and family. By the mid-1920s it would also be home to her brother Robert’s ex-wife Etta Cowsert Branson. Mamie therefore got to be an on-the-scene aunt for a gaggle of nieces and nephews.

Emmett appears in the 1924 voter register in Taft. That is chronologically the last trace of him found thus far. He may have died. He may have abandoned Mamie. Death is considered to be the more likely scenario, but no record of his demise has turned up. The 1930 census designates Mamie as a widow, but censuses depend on self-reportage and it could be that Mamie was characterizing herself as a widow because Emmett was “dead to her.”

Some time during the 1920s, Mamie moved from Taft to its sister community of Ford City. The two towns being essentially contiguous, she was therefore still close to her sister and sister-in-law and their broods of kids. By 1930, most of those kids were reaching, or had already reached, adulthood. One of the exceptions was her favorite, her niece Louise Cowsert, born in 1920. Her bond with Louise was as close as Mamie would ever get to being a mother.

In the early 1930s, Mamie joined her sister Mabel in Oregon. This probably occurred immediately after the marriage of Mabel to her second husband Alfred Wallace “Doc” Bayn, an event that took place in the 1931-34 time frame. With Doc, the sisters operated a getaway-resort inn known as Bigelow’s in the woods near Bend, Deschutes County, OR. (The photo of Mamie at left was taken at the inn during this period.) However, Mamie’s participation in the business was not longterm, because she died 9 February 1935. After her death, arrangements were made to transport her body to Madera, Madera County, CA, where it was interred at Arbor Vitae Cemetery next to the graves of her brother William Henry Branson and sister Mattie Branson, who had both perished in young adulthood. Later her mother and her stepfather Joseph Eagle would also be laid to rest there.

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