Martha “Mattie” Branson

Mattie Branson, daughter of Reuben Branson and Louisa Armstrong, was born 29 October 1882 in Mariposa County, probably at Hite’s Cove. She was a twin of Mabel. Her formal name was Martha. She is not to be confused with her father’s sister, who was another Martha “Mattie” Branson.

Mattie was raised in the foothills of Mariposa and Madera County. (While Mattie was a small child, Madera County did not yet exist; the territory it is now comprised of was then part of Fresno County.) The family frequently shifted its base from various mining sites or the places Reuben worked as a lumberman, sawmill worker, and blacksmith. These places include the Potter Ridge and Grub Gulch areas. By the middle of the 1890s, as William and David, the oldest sons of the family, became old enough to help with financial support, Louisa chose to stop moving about -- even though Reuben continued to roam in search of opportunities -- and settled into a house in the quarry town of Raymond in Madera County.

During the Raymond years Mattie, along with her twin sister, was increasingly called upon to be a young woman of the household. Finances and family dynamics were such that all the Branson girls were hired out as domestic servants in local homes at various times while in their early teens. With older sister Mamie crippled by either polio or an untreated hip displacement, Mattie and Mabel shouldered an extra amount of responsibility.

In the latter part of 1900 Reuben Branson took a job with the Yellow Aster Mining Company in the Indian Wells Valley on the eastern side of the Sierra Nevada range, in Kern County near the corners of Inyo and San Bernardino Counties. The family moved to Randsburg, a company town. Mattie was old enough to be out on her own but it is thought she came along at first. If so, she did so only briefly. She was in Fresno County when she died 4 January 1902 of diphtheria. She was buried at Arbor Vitae Cemetery, Madera, CA near her brother William Henry Branson, who had died five years earlier from a similar cause. Arbor Vitae over the next few decades would be the place where the remains of many members of the families of Reuben Branson and his brother John Sevier Branson, Jr. would be laid to rest. Her gravemarker (shown above at left) is engraved with the wrong birth year.

Mattie and twin sister Mabel Grace Branson (left) with their older sister Mamie (Mary Jane) Branson (seated), a picture taken in the early 1890s.

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