Carl Andrew Brannen, Sr.: A Life of Service and Education (1899–1977)

Carl Andrew Brannen, Sr, educator, military officer, rancher, and memoirist, was born at Saron, Texas, on February 19, 1899. He was the second of six children and the oldest son of William Jefferson Brannen and Charlotte (Walker) Brannen. His father had come from Alabama to East Texas a few years after the Civil War and farmed and fired the boilers on the night shift at the Saron sawmill in Trinity County.

Because Carl’s mother died from her dress catching fire when he was young, his maternal grandparents, Andrew Jackson Walker and Azalean (Dial) Walker, and an aunt, Polly Dial Johnson, helped raise him. Thus he grew up hearing the stories of the Civil War, as Walker had served in the Thirteenth Texas Infantry (Bates) and Thirty-fifth Texas Cavalry (Brown’s), and an Uncle Ephraim (Polly's brother) had served in Hood's Texas Brigade, Longstreet's Corps, and Robert E. Lee's Army of Northern Virginia.

Brannen had to leave his family and move to Trinity to attend high school, as there was no education beyond the ninth grade in Saron. He worked to pay for room and board and graduated from high school in 1916. He won a scholarship to Texas A&M College (now Texas A&M University), attended briefly as an animal husbandry major, and then entered the U.S. Marine Corps in World War I. He wrote in his memoir, Over There: A Marine in the Great War (1996): “I felt that my family should do their bit in uniform, and my age designated me as the most appropriate one….Accordingly, I joined the exodus from Texas A&M College, as cadets went into different branches of service. My resignation was January 27, 1918, at midterm.”

He was put in a rifle company of the Sixth Marine Regiment in the U.S. Army’s Second Division and headed for France. He fought in the battles of Belleau Wood, Soissons, St. Mihiel, Blanc Mont (where he was wounded), and the Meusse Argonne. Brannen received four awards from the French government for those battles. His Marine brigade earned from the Germans the nickname “Devil Dogs.” After the war, Brannen served in the elite Pershing’s Honor Guard and paraded in Paris, London, New York City, and Washington, D.C.

After the war, he attended Sam Houston State Teachers College (now Sam Houston State University) in Huntsville. He had always been very athletic and did some amateur boxing while he was a student. On September 7, 1924, Carl Brannen married Bess Courtney. They quickly had two sons—Carl Andrew Brannen, Jr. (1925) and Joseph Patrick Brannen (1927)--while Carl was  a teacher and principal at New Willard, Texas. At that time, he held only a teaching certificate. Later he completed a B.A. degree from Stephen F. Austin State Teachers College (now Stephen F. Austin State University) and an M.A. degree from Sam Houston State University. Both degrees were in history.

In 1932 Carl Brannen and his family returned to the old family home at Saron to care for his aging grandmother, Azalean Walker, and great Aunt Polly. He became a teacher and principal at the school in nearby Saglen—a four-room school with ten grades. His wife Bess also taught in the school. He became superintendent of schools for Trinity County in 1934. About this time in the 1930s, he probably wrote the memoir of his World War I service. A daughter, Willie Frances, was born in 1935.

Brannen held the elective school superintendent position until 1942. At that time, he both completed his M.A. in history at Sam Houston State Teachers College and was commissioned a captain in the Marine Corps. He went on active duty in the spring of 1942. In officer training at Quantico, Virginia, he ranked first in rifle marksmanship and second with the pistol of some 400 officers. He was assigned to the Marine Corps Air Station at Eagle Mountain Lake in Texas. His wife moved with their two younger children to Decatur, where she taught school. He was then sent to El Toro Marine Corps Air Station in California, and the family followed him and lived in Laguna Beach, where son Joseph Patrick graduated from high school. Brannen was discharged from the Marine Corps in June 1944 as the result of low blood pressure.

He returned to Texas and ran for the Democratic nomination for U.S. Congress in his home district but lost because there was not enough time to mount an effective campaign before the July 1944 election. He and Bess moved to Lake Jackson,  where area school districts had voted to form the Brazosport Independent School District. While Bess Brannen taught the fifth grade at Lake Jackson Elementary School, Carl Brannen was the principal of a school at Camp Chemical, a temporary camp constructed by the Defense Plant Corporation. When the school was closed, he moved to the administration offices in Freeport and later became the audio visual supervisor for the Brazosport Independent School District. He enjoyed filming the football games of the two high schools in the district and taught several boys in the schools in the district how to show movies to the classes.

Carl Brannen, Jr., was killed in action during World War II when his plane, in which he was a part of the crew, was shot down in a raid over Marcus Island in the Pacific Ocean on May 9, 1945. His remains were never recovered. The American Legion Andy Brannen Post 306 in Lake Jackson is named in his honor. Joseph Brannen had followed his brother into Texas A&M, but at age seventeen he  joined the U.S. Navy and became a pilot. After the war, he returned to A&M and finished his degree, majoring in biology, and then received a master’s degree in mathematics from Sam Houston State University and a Ph.D. at the University of Texas at Austin.

In 1947 Carl Brannen and his wife attended summer school at the University of Wisconsin, where she studied teaching remedial reading, and he continued studies in audio visual education. They then enrolled at the University of Houston, where Bess completed an M.A. Carl finished everything but a dissertation for a doctorate when his wife became ill with cancer. Bess died of cancer in 1958. Ten years later, an elementary school in Lake Jackson was named in her honor.

Carl resumed teaching history. He retired from the Brazosport Independent School District in 1959 and moved back to the old home place in Trinity County, where he raised cattle. In 1959 he married a widow, Leona Burke, and the two enjoyed living in the country in Trinity County. When Leona died in 1970, Carl moved in with his daughter Frances and her husband in Waco. 

Carl Andrew Brannen, Sr., died in Hillcrest Hospital in Waco on October 9, 1977. He had a U.S. Marine Corps military burial in Restwood Memorial Park in Clute, Texas, where he was buried next to Bess Brannen. An honor guard of the Marine Reserve from Galveston served his funeral along with veterans from Andy Brannen American Legion Post 306.

After Carl Brannen’s death, a rolled-up scroll was found that turned out to be the memoirs of World War I that he wrote in the 1930s. With the support of military historian and president of Texas A&M University Frank E. Vandiver, Texas A&M University Press published the memoir, and it became the first book of many in their C. A. Brannen Series, named in his honor.

Carl Brannen Jr. has a commemorative marker in Restwood Memorial Park with his parents’ graves, and he is memorialized in the National Memorial Cemetery of the Pacific in Honolulu, Hawaii; in the missing section of the Dallas-Fort Worth National Cemetery; and on the monument at Groveton High School for those lost at war. Most important to his parents—his name is on the Wall of the Memorial Student Center at Texas A&M University, Class of ’45. Joseph Brannen died on June 20, 2024. Having earned a doctorate in mathematics from the University of Texas in 1962, he taught math and physics and then worked at Sandia Labs for more than twenty-four years and was a national lecturer in biomathematics for the Society for Industrial and Applied Mathematics. In 2002 The University of Texas at Austin established in his name a graduate fellowship for excellence in mathematics.