Mary Jane Branson

Mary Jane Branson, the third daughter and seventh child of John Sevier Branson and Martha Jane Ousley, was born 25 July 1862 at Phillips Flat, a gold mining outpost along the Merced River, CA. She grew up mostly in Mariposa County, first at Phillips Flat (a place that now lies submerged beneath Lake McClure reservoir), then a year (1868-69) in the Willamette Valley of Oregon, and from the age of seven onward at “Grasshopper Ranch,” her parents’ longterm estate a few miles north of Hornitos, CA. Mary Jane is not to be confused with her brother Reuben’s daughter Mamie, who formally was also named Mary Jane Branson.

Grasshopper Ranch adjoined the property of the Washington Mine, one of the most active hardrock mines of the latter part of the Mother Lode era and a major employer in Mariposa County. The site of the mine complex was considered part of Quartzburg, a hamlet founded at the beginning of the Gold Rush. Like Phillips Flat, Quartzburg does not exist anymore, but in Mary Jane's youth, it was abuzz with activity, with Washington Mine being only one of the on-going excavations. Many men of the overall Branson clan -- whether their last names were Branson, or Scott, Peard, Simmons, Guest, Williams, or another surname prevalent among the various cousins and in-laws -- spent an interval employed at Washington Mine. In particular, it was a mainstay employer of Alvin Thorpe Branson. Of all Mary Jane's brothers, Alvin was the one closest to her in age, and the one with whom she shared the closest bond. As the late 1870s rolled around, one of Alvin’s new colleagues was Alonzo Diah Johnson.

Alonzo, eldest son of John F. Johnson and Betsey Abigail Richardson, had grown up in Orange County, VT in the small communities of Vershire and Ely, where his parents had farmed, and where the family home doubled as a boarding house for local miners. Born in late 1853 or the first part of 1854, Alonzo had come of age at a time when the Ely copper mine was the foundation of the local economy, and it was only natural Alonzo had chosen to pursue mining as an occupation. Unfortunately, as the 1870s had progressed, the Ely mine had become increasingly exhausted. So Alonzo had headed west, and by the end of the 1870s had ended up in Mariposa County.

Mary Jane met Alonzo at age sixteen or seventeen, which meant she was nearing the typical age when Mariposa County girls of that era became brides. She seems not to have wanted to be left out, particularly when all of her older siblings except Alvin were already married, and Alvin was courting Mary Eliza Simmons, a friend of hers. Mary Jane and Alonzo became wife and husband 17 March 1880. The marriage certificate was completed at Washington Mine, with Alvin was one of the signatory witnesses. It is possible Washington Mine was the precise location of the ceremony. However, a wedding at Grasshopper Ranch is a more likely scenario. If this were the case, the document would still refer to Washington Mine because the outpost would have been the closest place to Grasshopper Ranch where a pastor or justice of the peace was available to provide a signature. Mary Jane’s choice of spouse ultimately proved to be unique among her sisters. She was the only one whose first husband was a miner. Given the environment in which the Branson girls had been raised, one would think more of them would have done as Mary Jane did. All of her brothers married daughters of miners, yet all four of her sisters married men of other professions -- a subsequent exception being when Nancy remarried after the death of her first husband.

Old mining claims on file in Mariposa County show that Alonzo partnered up with Alvin and with Samuel Tibbett to try to exploit independent diggings. As far as can be determined, these efforts generated little or no income, and the men depended on their wage-earning jobs at Washington Mine or similar operations. As far as is known, the couple remained in Mariposa County for several years. They became parents of three children, Clarence in 1883, George in 1885, and Bretelle in 1887. The latter was named for Alonzo’s sister, Bretelle C. Johnson.

Family rumor says Alonzo went to New Mexico in the mid-1880s and died in a mining accident. No corroboration has been found, and if true, it is not clear whether Mary Jane went with him. All records show California birthplaces for the kids. It is possible the New Mexico story was a fabrication. Alvin and wife Mary Simmons Branson did relocate briefly to New Mexico in 1882, where he was a coal miner, and though there is no mention of Alonzo and/or Mary Jane going along, it is conceivable they did. If so, Alonzo and Mary Jane would have returned within months as Alvin and Mary did, abandoning the area due to concern about Geronimo and his warriors. One would think if Alonzo had died in a way as dramatic as a mining accident, some mention of it would have appeared in the Mariposa Gazette or similar source. Contrariwise, Mary Jane’s niece Grace Mildred Branson Warner (daughter of Joseph Branson) wrote a comment in genealogical notes on two separate occasions stating that her aunt Mary Jane’s husband had abandoned her. Certainly if Alonzo died, that would have been a form of abandonment, but Grace would not have meant that. Grace was a notorious gossip, and would have recalled the detail because of the scandalous aspect. It has to be noted that Mary Jane, though she lived another sixty years and more, never married again. She was only twenty-five in 1887. She was regarded as a beauty and was known to have had male admirers. For her to have forged on alone supports the gossip that indicates she had a bad marriage. There is also the possibility she may have been uninterested in sex with males, and knew better than to again put herself in the position of being obliged to perform wifely duties in the bedroom. This would go far to account for Alonzo growing dissatisfied with her as his partner.

Alonzo’s fate is unknown. If he abandoned his wife and kids, he may have tried to erase his tracks. It could be he did go to New Mexico and die in a mine -- but after he and Mary Jane were already estranged. All that can be said for sure is that he and Mary Jane were still together at the end of 1886, when Bretelle was conceived, but that by the late 1880s, she was a single mother responsible for the care of three minor children.

Given Alvin’s friendship with Alonzo, Mary Jane may have felt uncomfortable with the prospect of continuing to reside in Mariposa County, so she sought the other main haven of the Branson family, which was Merced, Merced County, CA. This community was home to her sisters Nancy Anne Branson Harrington and Theresa Branson, and had been where her sister Phoebe Ann Branson had been living until she had passed away in 1887. It continued to be where Phoebe’s widower William McDonald and the four McDonald children dwelled. (It is possible Mary Jane and Alonzo had come to Merced as early as 1883. The 1920 census record of her eldest son, Clarence, states that he was born in Merced, though this could be informant error.)

To support herself and her kids, Mary Jane took a full-time job as a clerk in a Merced drygoods store. She also combined forces with her sister Nancy to run a boarding house. This did not mean she gave up the clerk job. While Nancy remained on-site at the boarding house round the clock as cook and housekeeper, Mary Jane worked at the store on weekdays and did the boarding house laundry during the evenings. This may have been a scheme the sisters developed during the 1880s, or it could be it did not come about until 1890. In January of that year, Nancy’s husband Peter Harrington unexpectedly died while on a trip to San Francisco, and Nancy was left spouseless with a brood of six children to care for.

Once the boarding house sprang into being, Mary Jane lived there, and kept her younger two children, George and Bretelle, with her. Eldest son Clarence was taken in as a ward by Theresa and her husband William Osborne Moore, who were otherwise childless. Theresa and Will lived three doors down on the same street, so Clarence was never far away from his mother and siblings. The big building full of people seems to have remained Mary Jane’s milieu until approximately 1906 (aside from times when she hired herself out at nearby ranches as a cook and laundress). By the end of that year, all of both Mary Jane’s and Nancy’s broods had fled the nest and there was no more need for the sisters to financially support their offspring. A great exodus of the Branson clan from Merced took place, with Nancy and all her kids moving northward into San Joaquin County. Mary Jane’s three all went to the San Francisco Bay Area. Southern Pacific -- the main employer in Merced -- needed lots of able-bodied men to help repair the company infrastructure after the great earthquake, and it appears that Clarence, George, and Bretelle’s husband Gifford M. Fowle, all took advantage of this opportunity. The term “appears” is used because Clarence and George are not specifically known to have worked for Southern Pacific, but it stands to reason that something brought them to the Bay Area at this juncture. Gifford M. Fowle is known to have been a Southern Pacific employee from his early teens until, with one interruption, his retirement many decades later, and family writings confirm he came to Berkeley in 1906 for the purpose of post-earthquake repair.

Mary Jane may have gone with her children to the Bay Area. She definitely accompanied Bretelle and Gifford when the Fowle household shifted in late 1906 or early 1907 to Redlands in San Bernardino County, though it is not clear whether Mary Jane lived in the home, or simply resided nearby. Mary Jane was therefore on hand for the birth of grandchild Gifford Benjamin Fowle (her second grandchild, after Clarence’s daughter Ruth) in November, 1907, and no doubt was of great help as a grandma-nanny. This arrangement was fairly brief, though. The 1910 census shows Bretelle, Gifford M., and Gifford B. Fowle living in Oakland. Mary Jane, once more a clerk in a drygoods store, is still in Redlands, living as a lodger with a female roommate.

Mary Jane apparently fell in love with southern California, and chose to reside there throughout her last four decades of life. Only the first years were spent in Redlands. After that, she lived in Los Angeles. The only exception was an interval in late 1919 and early 1920 when she lived with Bretelle again when the Fowle family was in Santa Barbara County. She appears as Mary J. Johnson, “mother-in-law” of householder Gifford in the 1920 census for the town of Santa Maria, working again as a clerk in a drygoods store. That census is somewhat deceptive about Gifford, however. He had completed night courses that allowed him to get a better position with Southern Pacific Railroad, and had gone to Oakland to take that job. Mary Jane’s presence was no doubt a result of Bretelle’s need to have someone to help look after her children, now three in number. The situation was temporary -- so temporary that when surviving child Esta Jane Fowle was asked about the matter in 2006, she had no memory of her grandmother having lived with the family. Early in 1920 Bretelle and the kids moved north to rejoin Gifford, and Mary Jane went back to L.A. Family gossip hints that Bretelle may have briefly contemplated continuing to live separately, and that Mary Jane’s advice to her daughter about the difficulty of raising children on one’s own may have been timely.

What Mary Jane did for the final twenty-five years or so of her life is not well delineated, except that she remained remarkably independent for a female of her generation, living well apart from her offspring -- Clarence being based in Manteca (and then deceased as of 1932), George in Alameda, and Bretelle in Oakland/Berkeley. The 1930 L.A. census shows her, at age sixty-seven, working as a live-in housekeeper. Surviving pictures give glimpses -- she appears in several photos from the 50th wedding anniversary of Alvin and Mary Branson, an event held in at Oak Park in Stockton in July 1930. (Mary Jane had been the bridesmaid at the wedding in 1880.) She appears in a family group shot taken in the summer of 1936 at the Woodland, CA home of one of her sister Nancy’s daughters. An early 1943 snapshot shows her at age eighty, holding the one-year-old daughter of her grandson George Bertrand Johnson, Jr. -- George, Jr. was the only one of Mary Jane’s children or grandchildren to reside in the Los Angeles area during that period. Newspaper accounts confirm Mary Jane made a habit of journeying up from L.A. in the 1930s and 1940s to participate in Native Daughters lodge activities and “children of pioneers” celebrations in Manteca or Stockton that her sisters and/or nieces were involved with.

From the vantage of the 21st Century and lacking any words she wrote, the greater part of what went on in Mary Jane’s mind and soul is occluded now. A bit of insight comes from a clipping she carried on her person for many years, a stanza written by G.K. Chesterton:

Mary Jane died 14 February 1949 in Los Angeles.

Children of Mary Jane Branson with Alonzo Diah Johnson

John Clarence Diah Johnson (Clarence Johnson)

George Bertrand Johnson

Alice Bretelle Johnson (Bretelle Johnson)

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