Branch House - Background

Background

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. On his death in 1915, the New York Times called him 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. Both Quakers, 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 (b. 1887), Zayde Bancroft Branch (b. 1891), and Louise Branch (b. 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 armour. 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 of 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 Kerry 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. Edmond Addison Rennolds Sr.) subsequently gifted the home to a Richmond charity. 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.