Maud Celia (Packwood) Brotherson (1883 - abt. 1953)

Born 14 Nov 1883 in Washington

Ancestors

Descendants

Died about 1953 at about age 69 in Aberdeen, WA

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Biography

Maud played cello in the family orchestra, known as the Bucoda Orchestra. The orchestra traveled on bicycles, Maud with her cello strapped to her back, and performed at barn dances and other social events. She was highly intelligent and creative individual, and raised several children as a single parent after her first husband, Milt Gibson, divorced her and married her sister.

Maud married young and had her first child, Vida, at age 16. She was home alone at her and Milt's farm in the Hannaford Valley near Centralia when the baby arrived. Maud delivered the baby on the kitchen floor, swaddled and fed it, and had supper on the table when Milt came home that night (Milt in those days was farming for a neighbor in the daytime then coming home in the evening to work on his own place).

After her divorce, Maud married John Brotherson, a farmer with a wooden peg leg. She and John farmed just outside of Centralia, and their farm was bisected by Interstate 5 when it was constructed. The farm extended from the Skookumchuck RIver to where Midway Meats is now, and across where the I-5 freeway is to the cluster of houses. Maud and John lived in one of those houses until the freeway was built, after which they built a house on the other side of the freeway (the river side) and lived there. The second house no longer exists. According to an article in the Elma Chronicle, she resided at 1113 Airport Road near Centralia.

Don Mustard related that when he was a child, he would follow John Brotherson during plowing and find Indian arrowheads in the furrows, as that field had been a long-time gathering place the the Chehalis tribe.

Sources

• http://wc.rootsweb.ancestry.com/cgi-bin/igm.cgi?op=GET&db=est3739-2&id=I13377