The Branches in England

The Branches first settled in Wiltshire, then moved to the County of Kent. Tradition states that the great-grandfather of Christopher Branch, who emigrated to Virginia, was Sir John Branch, who circa 1485, was Lord Mayor of London.  His son, William Branch, a notorious Protestant fanatic, was executed during the reign of Henry VIII’s daughter, “Bloody Mary.”

Williams’ grandson, Christopher, son of Thomas, emigrated to Virginia in the ship London Merchant in 1619.   Another grandson, Peter, son of John, emigrated to Massachusetts in 1638 in the ship Castle, but died on the voyage. His son, John, survived him and recorded his father’s will –the first so done–in Boston.

John Branch, the progenitor of the New England Branches, married Mary Speed and settled at Branch Island, 10 miles north of Plymouth Rock in MA.

Thomas Branch of Petersburg and Richmond

Christopher Branch, the grandson of William Branch, was born about 1600 and married in early in life to Mary.  In 1619, they arrived in Jamestown, VA.  

Having survived the Great Massacre of 1622, when Opechancanough almost succeeded in exterminating the English colony, Christopher and Mary had their first child Thomas.  In 1624, the first census taken of the inhabitants of Virginia states he was living in Henrico County on the College Land, which had been set aside as a place for training and educating the indigenous people.  He patented 100 acres of land at “Arrowhattocks,” which appears in Captain John Smith’s map on the north side of the James River, in what was then Henrico County.  His eventual and permanent home was at “Kingsland,” almost immediately across from “Arrowhattocks” on the south side of the James, in what is now Chesterfield County.

During the Civil War, Thomas established Thomas Branch & Co in Richmond, establishing his permanent home there after the war.  In 1871, he founded the Merchants National Bank of Richmond.  

Thomas Branch, who died in 1888, had 16 children, 13 by Sarah Pride Read and 3 by Anne Adams Wheelright.  

In 1880, Thomas resigned the presidency of the Merchants National Bank, John Patteson Branch, his third and oldest surviving son by Sarah Pride Read, succeeded him. 

Thomas’s second son by Sarah Pride Read, Colonel James Read Branch, was an honored veteran of the Confederate Army.  Having suffered a severe leg injury during battle, he resigned from the army in 1865.  After the war, he became a leader among those businessmen struggling to rebuild the city’s economy and helped to found the Merchants’ Exchange, the Corn and Flour Exchange Association, and the Tobacco Exchange. 

Although his political career was brief, James Branch Read, sought to reunite blacks and whites in the wake of Reconstruction.   He ran for a seat in the senate in 1869 and shared the ticket for the Conservative Party, which supported Gilbert R. Walker for governor of VA.  They won a sweeping victory against a so called carpet-bagger.   

Col. Branch’s political future seemed bright.  Deeming defeat of the hated Radicals to be all important, his Conservatives party sought support from black voters. Branch endorsed that tactic and urged Conservative speakers to appeal to the reason of black voters rather than abuse them.

While attending a barbecue sponsored by the Colored Walker Club of Richmond on July 2, 1869, four days before the election, Branch stepped onto a temporary bridge that provided access to an island in the James River where the event took place.  Defying efforts to block attendees with a ticket, Branch shouted to a policeman to open the gate to all. With the crowd streaming onto the bridge, it suddenly collapsed, tossing Branch under the broken timbers and chains of the bridge into the river, where he drowned. 

Two days later, thousands followed James Read Branch’s coffin from Saint Paul’s Episcopal Church to Hollywood Cemetery. Members of the Colored Walker Club joined the procession, taunted by other African Americans, who regarded them as traitors.

Martha Patteson Branch never remarried and taught her children to revere their father’s memory. Branch’s youngest daughter, Mary-Cooke Branch Munford later explained her activism as inspired by the example of her father.

 Mary-Cooke Branch Munford received her primary and secondary education in Richmond and New York. Prevented from attending college by her mother, Munford became an avid reader and developed an active social conscience. She served as the first woman on the Richmond School Board, helped organize the Virginia Inter-Racial Committee, advocated equal educational opportunities, and worked to improve rural high schools. Through her efforts, women were admitted to the College of William and Mary in 1918. She also served as a trustee of the National Child Labor Committee. Munford’s work exemplifies the public activism countless women pursued during the Progressive era.

Colonel James Read Branch’s brother, John Patteson Branch (1830-1915), was banker, philanthropist and community leader.  Born 9 October 1830 in Petersburg, VA, John Patteson died 2 February 1915 in Richmond.  He married Mary Louise Merritt Kerr on 12 May 1863.  They had four children: Blythe Walker Branch, John Kerr Branch, Effie Kerr Branch, and Margaret Elizabeth Branch. Marriage 12 May 1863. Petersburg City, Virginia. 

Interested in improving public welfare, John Patteson Branch helped reorganize the Richmond Board of Health and the adoption of more effective sanitary regulation. In 1909 he erected Richmond’s first public bath at 1801 East Broad Street as a gift to the city. In the late 19th and early 20th centuries, cities such as Baltimore, Philadelphia, and New York began operating municipally managed public baths that were open throughout the year to promote good public health. In 1913, Branch Public Bath No. 2 at 709 West Main Street was opened. At the peak of operation in the early 1920s, more than 80,000 customers used the two facilities each year. The development of domestic indoor plumbing led to the closing of the two public baths in 1950.  

John Patteson was a steward and trustee of the Centenary Methodist Church in Richmond and a member of the Board of Trustees of Randolph-Macon College in Ashland, where he donated the Branch Dormitory.  He also served on the board of the Methodist Orphanage of the Virginia Conference.  

John Kerr Branch was born in Danville, Virginia, to Mary Louise Merritt Kerr (1840–1896) and John Patteson Branch (1830–1915), both originally of Petersburg, Virginia. The elder Branch was a noted Richmond banker, investor, financier and philanthropist. 

The late 19th century saw the expansion of the US financial system but was also beset by banking panics. Regarded as one of the foremost businessmen of the South, John Patteson Branch convinced the Richmond banking community to refrain from issuing script—a typical response by banks to preserve their currency reserves. During the Bank Panic of 1907.  As a result of the stability he helped to bring to Richmond, it became known as a banking center that ultimately became one of the centers for the Federal Reserve system.

Regarded as one of the foremost businessmen of the South, during the bank panic of 1907, John Patteson Branch convinced the Richmond banking community to refrain from issuing script, a practice detrimental to the economy, but a typical response by banks to preserve their currency reserves.   As a result of the financial stability he helped to bring to Richmond, it became known as a banking center that ultimately became one of the nodes for the Federal Reserve system. On his death in 1915, The New York Times called Branch the “Nestor of Richmond Bankers.”  

John Kerr Branch grew up in Richmond and attended the McGuire School, subsequently studying in Paris and Germany (1882–1884). At age 21 he began clerking with his father’s firm, Thomas Branch & Company. Branch invested successfully in real estate and railroads; ultimately inherited his family’s banking fortune; and became director of the Continental Insurance Company of New York (chiefly involved with Southern cotton mills and railroads) and the Petersburg Savings and Insurance Company. He became President of Merchants National Bank of Richmond (having founded the bank in 1871); President of Thomas Branch and Company, later Branch & Company, (1837–1976); and President of Bankers and Brokers, Richmond. He was a member of the New York Stock Exchange and in addition to numerous Richmond clubs, also a member of the New York Yacht Club and the Downtown Association of New York. 

Branch met Beulah Frances Gould in Germany on a retreat in the Black Forest. They married in 1886 at the Gould family’s rural estate, Elmwood, at Quaker Hill, Pawling, New York, and subsequently had three children: John Akin (born 1887), Zayde Bancroft born 1891), and Louise Gould (born 1900). 

Branch had already begun a career as an avid collector at age 19, when he acquired two 16th-century chairs. He and his wife Beulah later became widely known as collectors of Italian Renaissance paintings, furniture, tapestries, woodwork and armor. For the design of their new home, they began working with the firm of John Russell Pope in 1914, well before the firm’s noted commissions in Washington, D.C. At the time when the Branches commissioned the home, Pope’s firm had just won the competition to design Richmond’s Broad Street Train Station, just two blocks to the north on land owned by Branch’s father near Monument Avenue’s Jefferson Davis memorial. The elder Branch gifted an entire city block to his son and daughter on condition that they build their homes there. John Kerr built on one half of the block, and construction was complete in 1919 at a cost of $160,000, roughly the equivalent of $19 million in 2010.

The Branches lived “seasonally,” maintaining Elmwood, their farm estate at Quaker Hill, Pawling, New York and later also acquiring a 15th-century Italian Renaissance villa near Florence (Villa Marsilio Ficino in Fiesole). Branch House was their winter home. 

John Kerr Branch died in Fiesole on July 1, 1930, at age 65 of bronchitis, and was buried in Richmond. Beulah Gould Branch continued to live in the home until her death in 1952. 

Their daughter, Zayde Branch Rennolds (Mrs. Edmund Addison Rennolds Sr.)  subsequently gifted the home to a Richmond charity, the Community Chest (later the United Way). A decade later, in the late 1960s, their granddaughter Zayde Rennolds Dotts (Mrs. Walter Dotts, Jr.) created the Monument Avenue Preservation Society to protect the surroundings of the home her grandparents had commissioned.  She solidified city protection of Monument Avenue by helping to have it declared a City Old & Historic District and strengthened public appreciation by instituting the Monument Avenue Easter Parade in 1974, an annual event that continues to attract thousands.  

Blythe Walker Branch was the eldest son of John Patteson Branch, and spent the greater portion of his life in Paris,France where he was awarded The Legion d’Honneur, the highest French order of merit for military and civil accomplishments. On returning to Richmond after the death of his wife, he helped found the Virginia Museum of Fine Arts and served as its president until his health declined.

Effie Kerr Branch was the eldest daughter of John Patteson Branch and resided in Richmond with a summer house in Maine. On her father’s death, she took over his house at number 1 West Franklin Street and lived there until her death in 1934.

Margaret Elizabeth Branch Glasgow, married Arthur Graham Glasgow in 1901.  They lived primarily in London, where in 1892 Arthur G. Glasgow and Alexander Crombie Humphreys and established Humphreys and Glasgow for the erection of water-gas plants and apparatus.   Margaret and Arthur had one daughter, Margaret “Marjorie” Branch Glasgow, who married Ambrose Christian Congreve in 1935.  Congreve took over the company in 1939, when Glasgow retired.   He and Marjorie lived at his family’s 18^th century  home, Mount Congreve, in  County Waterford, Ireland.  When Ambrose Congreve died in 2011,  Arthur and Margaret Branch’s estate was finally settled with $125 million given primarily to Richmond based-institutions—primarily the Virginia Museum of Fine Arts and Virginia Commonwealth Univeristy.

Edmund A. and Zayde Branch Rennolds’ had three other children:  Beulah Rennolds Burke,  John Kerr Branch Rennolds and Edmund “Ned” Addison Rennolds Jr. Ned Rennolds, a principal in Branch & Co, which later merged with Davenport & Co., was a founder of the Richmond Symphony, 

Beulah Rennolds Burke had four children:  Addison, John, Betsy and  Robert Burke.

John Kerr Branch Rennolds had 3 children:  John Akin, Zayde Bancroft, and Louise. John and Louise had no children. Zayde’s children were:

Edmund A. Rennolds Jr., who had six children: Edmund, Anne, Louise, David, Helen, and Mary Zayde (Bucci).

Zayde Gordon Rennolds Dotts, who had four children: had four children: Zayde, Marjorie, Walter, and Thomas.

John Kerr Branch Rennolds, who had four children: Robert, Caroline, Amelie, and Margaret.