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, where they remained for several years.

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 somewhat crippled from the effects of a childhood bout with polio or from an untreated hip displacement, Mattie and Mabel shouldered an extra amount of responsibility.

At the end of the 1890s, with the boys having fled the nest, Reuben and Louisa and their five girls -- Mamie, Mattie, Mabel, Maggie, and young Gertie -- became based in the town of Madera down in the San Joaquin Valley. On the whole Madera was a temporary “port in a storm” sort of locale for them, but individually Mattie may have developed a different attitude about the place. The city represented the first opportunity she’d ever had to be immersed in an urban environment, and her arrival there coincided with the juncture when she was old enough to contemplate an independent life. Had fate not been unkind to her and cut her life short, she might well have decided Madera was worth living in long-term.

In the winter of 1900-01 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. Louisa and her daughters made arrangements to join him there. An article in the Madera Mercury describes the going-away party their Madera friends and neighbors held for them on the evening of Friday, 5 April 1901. Yet subsequent editions of the newspaper amply demonstrate that Louisa and her daughters were living in Madera again by early summer -- or perhaps had not left at all. This was the point when Reuben and Louisa’s marriage broke apart for good, an earlier separation having occurred when Mattie and Mabel were still in diapers. Naturally it was a time of domestic upheaval. Kinfolk tried to blunt the turmoil. Reuben’s sister Mary came for a visit, introducing the perspective of an extra adult who could both represent her brother’s interest, and yet sympathize with her sister-in-law. The girls did not want to take sides. The older three, i.e. Mamie at age twenty-four, and Mattie and Mabel at age nineteen, contemplated removing themselves completely from the scene. A partial solution arose. Mamie, Mattie, and Mabel, perhaps in turn or perhaps all at the same time, went to spend most of the remaining months of 1901 up at Peckinpah’s Mill lumber camp in the Madera County hills, where Reuben’s brother John and his wife Lillian were establishing themselves for the season, John having just been hired to work at the sawmill. John and Lillian were relatives the girls had bonded to during the mid-1890s, when both Branson couples had been residents of Raymond. Inasmuch as John and Lillian had only male offspring (at that point), they viewed Mamie, Mattie, Mabel, Maggie, and Gertie as their surrogate daughters. Meanwhile at the end of July, Louisa moved to the city of Fresno, taking Maggie, age fourteen, and Gertie, age ten, with her.

In November, as snow closed down most operations at Peckinpah’s Mill, Mamie, Mabel, and Mattie returned to the valley. Mamie decided to live in Madera, but the twins moved back in with their mother for the moment. Both probably anticipated that it would be a temporary thing. In Mattie’s case, that was very much the case, but not for the reason she expected. Within a few weeks of her arrival in Fresno, she caught diphtheria and died 4 January 1902.

Mattie was the second of the family to suddenly pass away in young adulthood, the first having been her big brother William in 1897. He had been buried in Madera’s main cemetery, Arbor Vitae, and so arrangements were made to place Mattie in an adjacent grave -- arrangements probably handled more by John and Lillian Branson than by Reuben and Louisa. Today Mattie’s grave is part of a set of five containing her, William, sister Mamie, mother Louisa, and Louisa’s second husband, Joe Eagle. The latter three individuals died decades later, and as those burials were occurring, Mabel saw to it that a uniform set of headstones was commissioned. In the case of Mattie’s stone (shown above left), an error was made in the engraving and her birth year is wrong as 1883 instead of the correct 1882.

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