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Branch, Lawrence O'Brien

soldier, lawyer, congressman, was born July 7, 1820, in Halifax county, N. C. He was elected a representative from North Carolina to the thirty-fourth, thirty-fifth and thirty-sixth congresses. He took part in the great rebellion as a general, and was killed at the battle of Sharpsburg, Sept. 17, 1862.

BRANCH, MRS. MARY LYDIA BOL- LES, author, poet, was born June 13, 1840, in New London, Conn. She is best known by her poem, The Petrified Fern, and is the author of The Kanter Girls, which is a story for young people.

BRANCH, WILLIAM A. B., soldier, congressman, was born Feb. 26, 1847, in Tallahassee, Fla. He entered the Virginia Military institute, remaining there a few months, when he joined the confederate army; served as a courier on staff of general R. F. Hoke; and surrendered with General Johnston's army in 1865. He studied law under governor Thomas Bragg, of North Carolina, but never practiced. At the age of twenty he took charge of his landed estate in Beaufort county, N. C., upon which he has lived ever since, engaged in agriculture. He was elected to the fifty-second and re-elected to the fifty-third congress as a democrat.