Nancy Anne Branson
Nancy
Anne Branson, fifth child and second daughter of John Sevier Branson and Martha Jane Ousley, was
born 6 November 1856 at Barrett City, a large gold-mining outpost along the Merced River in Mariposa
County, CA. (Barrett City no longer exists, having been covered by Lake McClure reservoir when the
Exchequer Dam was built in the early 20th Century.) She was often known as Nan.
Nancy was born during a period when the family was still searching for a permanent base of operations. In the preceding several years her parents -- collectively or individually -- had lived in Missouri in Osage County and Gasconade County and in California in the Trinity Mountains, the Santa Clara Valley, the Livermore Valley, and locally downstream from Barrett City in the mining camps of Harte and Johnson’s Flat. It was only with a further move, this time to Phillips Flat on the eastern side of the river, that stability came. At Phillips Flat, the bench gravels were productive, and John was well situated to haul commercial loads of supplies up and down the Hornitos/Temperance Road. The family remained for about ten years, during which time Martha Jane gave birth to two more boys and two more girls.
Nancy was approaching twelve years old when her parents, having hoarded the income from the Phillips Flat years, decided that they had had enough of the rigors of the mining life. They relocated in 1868 to the Willamette Valley of Oregon, where John became a farmer and rancher once again. This was an occupation he would keep for the rest of his life, but doing so in Oregon proved to be temporary. Martha found the climate too wet and the skies too grey for her taste, so back the family came in 1869 to Mariposa County. John bought a ranch east of Phillips Flat, within the low, smooth, grassy foothills. The parcel was a few miles from Hornitos, near the mining outpost of Quartzburg. There he raised cattle and feed, as well as continuing to haul loads, prospecting only occasionally as a sideline. The couple resided on the property, called Grasshopper Ranch, for the rest of their lives, completing the raising of their brood of ten offspring -- the last child, Mattie, being born there in 1870.
As the 1870s progressed, Nancy’s older brothers established their independent lives. They chose to do so in Mariposa County. Nancy followed the example of her older sister Phoebe, who had married wheelwright William McDonald in 1874 and settled with him in Merced, Merced County, CA. Geographically Merced was not far from Hornitos and Quartzburg, but the cultural landscape was quite different. The character of Merced was dominated by the agricultural interests of the Central Valley and the commerce flowing along the Southern Pacific railway line, not by the mining and cattle ranching of the foothills. Phoebe and Nancy’s migration set a precedent that their next two sisters, Mary Jane and Theresa, would emulate as they came of age.
Nancy’s wedding date is not precisely known. Her obituary
states she was married at twenty-one, which if taken literally would mean she was married in late 1877
or during the first ten months of 1878. It is likely that the obituary was imprecise, because her first
child was born when she was twenty-one and five months old. It is probable she became a wife no later
than the end of summer, 1877. Nancy’s bridegroom was Peter Harrington, born 4 November 1852 in Cork
County, Ireland. According to the 1880 census and an 1880-81 city business directory, Peter was a retail
liquor dealer. This label may mean he was a saloonkeeper, but it seems more likely he sold liquor in
sealed bottles from a storefront operation rather than maintaining a drinking establishment, as the same
census and directory mention individuals in Merced who were
saloonkeepers, and Peter is not described that way. His partner in his enterprise, which was located
on Front Street, was Hugh McErlane -- the firm’s name was Harrington & McErlane. Hugh, also a native
of Ireland, was a man long associated with the Branson family from their mining camp days. Hugh, in
fact, was so well regarded by the clan that one of Nancy’s nephews had been given the name Hugh McErlane
Branson when born in 1875.
Children blessed the union at once and kept arriving at a rate of approximately one every other year, for a total of seven. This tally includes Michael Harrington, who survived only three days in the autumn of 1881.
A memoir written by a latter-day Branson clan member states that Nancy owned and operated a boarding house in Merced with her sister Mary Jane Branson Johnson. However, it is not known just when this venture began. It may have originated as a sole proprietorship in the early or mid-1880s as Nancy’s response to the financial burden of having so many children. It may have been launched about 1887, the year Mary Jane is believed to have become a single mother in need of a means of support for herself and her three offspring. But chances are excellent the two sisters arrived at the scheme after the death of Peter Harrington on 13 January 1890 while he was away in San Francisco (perhaps on a trip having to do with his liquor business).
Peter Harrington died at age thirty-six. His body was brought back to Merced for burial in Calvary Cemetery, where the remains of poor little Michael Harrington had been laid to rest a decade earlier. The loss of her husband could have set Nancy adrift, but it seems to have crafted her into an anchor of her extended family. The boarding house served as a home for herself, her children, her many lodgers, and for Mary Jane and her two younger children. (Mary Jane’s oldest child, Clarence Johnson, lived nearby as the ward of Nancy and Mary Jane’s sister Theresa Branson Moore and her husband William Osborn Moore.) It may also have been a haven at times for the four motherless children of her sister Phoebe, who had died in 1887. Theresa took an active role in looking after the latter group, but the eldest, John (Jock) McDonald, is shown as a lodger in the boarding house in the 1900 census, at age twenty-five, shortly before his marriage. Nancy was the business’s main operator, on site round the clock, cooking the meals and doing the housekeeping. Mary Jane worked full-time as a clerk at a drygoods store, doing the laundry for family members and lodgers in the evenings.
In the latter half of the 1890s Nancy married John James
Napier, known as “Babe” Napier. (Shown at left; photo taken in the year 1900.) The precise
date is again unavailable. The 1900 census indicates 1895, the 1910 census indicates 1898, and 1898 is cited
in Nancy’s obituary. Babe had been married at least once before; the 1930 census confirms a first marriage
at age twenty-two, which means a wedding in approximately 1873, but no details are available about his
earlier spouse or spouses. Babe was a miner, and was
often gone on mining expeditions in the hills. In 1900 he and a group of about two dozen local miners are
known to have accompanied Nancy’s brother Alvin Thorpe Branson to the gold fields of Nome, Alaska. Babe
may also have been part of Alvin’s trip to the Klondike in 1898. With Babe gone so often and his income
uncertain, Nancy did not immediately close down the boarding house. It remained in operation
past the turn of the century and Merced continued to be her residence. However, some time in the period
from 1902 to 1906 (her obituary states it was 1902), she and Babe moved to a farm in Castoria Township
in San Joaquin County, where Babe turned to grain-growing as a livelihood. This home was on Castle Road near
the town of Manteca, at a spot sometimes referred to during the early 20th Century as Summer Home. Nancy
would live there for the rest of her life -- a span of over thirty-five more years. The closing of the boarding
house was the end of an era. However, by the early 1900s, all the children whose support had been necessary
were either recently married or were about to be. Soon Merced was nearly bereft of members of the Branson
clan, even though it had been home to Phoebe, Nancy, Mary Jane, and Theresa and their households for a
generation. The only
holdouts after 1906 were two of Phoebe’s children, Jock McDonald and Teresa Garibaldi, along with their
father William and his second wife Agnes Dunn and Ellsworth McDonald, William’s son with Agnes.
The decision to make Manteca the new base of operations
may well have been a consequence of the marriage of Nancy’s daughter Eunice to a man of that community.
Eunice married Winfred Converse in 1900, and settled with him in Manteca. Some of
Fred’s acquaintances included Otis Cowell, the only son of Joshua Cowell,
the founder of the town, and Claude Salmon, another son of a Manteca pioneer. Otis married Elsie Harrington
in the latter part of 1904. Claude married Irene Harrington in late 1906. At this point it is impossible to
say if Nancy and Babe moved so that Elsie and/or Irene could be closer to their suitors, or if Elsie and
Irene acquired their suitors as a result of their change of venue.
Once Nancy and Babe put down their roots at the Castle Road ranch and once her girls had become wives of socially prominent local men, their presence seems to have been an example that drew many Branson kinsfolk to the area. By 1915 Manteca was home to Thomas Branson and his wife, along with several of their children -- in particular Alice Branson Williams, who arrived in approximately 1912 and acquired acreage very near Nancy and Babe. Clarence Johnson farmed nearby, raising his family, and his presence drew his foster parents Theresa and Will Moore to the area. Many other relatives settled not far north in Stockton, including Alvin Thorpe Branson and family. Stockton was also home off-and-on to Nancy’s children Josephine and Nina.
Nancy and Babe spent decades as elders of a large clan. Most
of Nancy’s grandchildren came of age in nearby homes. Nancy remained active as both a matriarch of the
family and as a society matron into her eighties. Newspaper articles from the late 1920s
and early 1930s list her as a participant in “Pioneer Day” activities, and hostess at gatherings of
the local chapter of the Native Daughters, a club that included a number of her daughters,
granddaughters, and nieces. (She had helped found the Native Daughters chapter in Merced.) She was also
a participating member of the Summer Home-Manteca Literary Society. (The photo at left, taken in
1930, perhaps shows her doing some of her reading for the group.) This society was more than a book
club. In the 1910s, there was no well-established network of public libraries in eastern San Joaquin
County and so individuals stepped up and operated reading rooms and small libaries in their homes. Nancy
herself did so for the Summer Home library beginning in 1918 when a neighbor across the road from her
had to give it up. This interest on Nancy’s part in reading was no small thing, given that she was the
child of a man who had been illiterate to his dying day. Her belief in the value of schooling, and the
role women
played in it, led to her serving as the senior vice president of the San Joaquin County chapter of the
Federation of Parent-Teacher Clubs. Nancy served at the same time as her niece Inez Branson, who was a
teacher. Together the two Branson women were part of an effort to place a woman on the San Joaquin
County board of education in 1914.
Babe Napier (who had been born in July 1861 in San Francisco, CA) died 18 April 1936 in Manteca. Nancy survived a little longer. She remained vigorous right up until literally the final day of her life. At about ten in the morning of 10 July 1939, she experienced a severe heart attack in the kitchen of her home. A doctor was summoned out to the ranch, but found her recovering well and she did not go to a hospital. She was at home that evening when she was struck by a second heart attack and died within minutes. Funeral services were held in Stockton at the chapel of Wallace & Son Funeral Home, after which her remains were interred at Park View Cemetery, Manteca.
Below you will find a photograph that shows a great many members of the Nancy Branson clan in the summer of 1936, when Nancy was seventy-nine years old. The scene is probably outside the home of Jack and Daisy Salmon in Woodland, CA. The back of the print shows a photo-lab date of 9 July 1936. That was when the film was developed and printed, and so the scene itself is likely to have been a July Fourth get-together. Two versions of the photo, taken moments apart, were preserved among the mementoes of Mary Josephine Harrington McDonald Baysinger. This one is the over-all sharpest version; however, the shutter speed was apparently slow and some individuals here -- mostly the little kids -- are shown in blurs because they were in motion when the photographer snapped the pose. The other version shows some of those individuals better and was used as a comparison while trying to identify everyone. (This was key to tentatively identifying little Wesley Devere Salmon because in the view shown here, with his head swiveling, he looks like a girl; in the other version, it is readily apparent that he is a boy.) Unfortunately, no names were written on either of the prints. At this time, only half of the group can be firmly identified. Chances are high, though, that everyone shown here is a family member, and some reasonable guesses have been made about the remaining half. What follows is a tentative I.D. list. If the names are rendered in bold, it means a positive I.D. has been made. If rendered in normal font, the I.D. is not yet confirmed.
From left to right in the back row: Wanda May Salmon Patrie, probably Daisy Catherine Lynn Salmon, probably Jack Wesley Salmon, probably Gifford Mecklenberg Fowle, Irene Anne Harrington Salmon, possibly Winfred Converse, Eunice Lucille Harrington Converse, Nancy Anne Branson Harrington Napier (probably wearing a hair net or wig), probably Alice Bretelle Johnson Fowle, Mary Jane Branson Johnson, Daniel Webster Baysinger, possibly Theresa Branson Moore, Roy Ames Price. Middle row: The small boy is probably Harold Otis Hodson. The woman is Nina Frances Harrington Riddell. In front, sitting, left to right: Possibly Claude Salmon, Mary Josephine Harrington McDonald Baysinger, Elsie Margaret Harrington Cowell with eight-year-old Barbara Jean McDonald sitting in front of her, Nancy Margaret McDonald Price with Eunice Martha Bianchi in front of her, age five, Mildred Anna Riddell Hillard with probably Wesley Devere Salmon in her lap, boy in very front is Robert Lee Patrie, leaning against eleven-year-old Everett Stanley Hillard, probably Josephine Agnes Converse Bianchi, probably John Everett Riddell.
Children of Nancy Anne
Branson with Peter Harrington
For genealogical details, click on
each of the names.
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