This photograph shows a street scene of the town of Mariposa in 1925. The Yosemite Hotel is on the left end of the large building (note the upper-story windows where the rooms-for-rent were located). The storefront in the center of the view is Gann’s Soda Fountain and Mariposa Telephone Company. These latter two businesses were owned and operated by Elias Jackson Gann (1876-1954), son of Mariposa County pioneer Elias Newton Gann, and wife Sarah Grosjean Gann (1874-1963), daughter of Mariposa County pioneer Frank Grosjean, Sr. In the window just to the right of the Model T Ford is a publicity poster for Circus Cyclone, a 1925 silent film starring cowboy actor Art Acord.

The photograph came from the collection of Ivan Thorpe Branson (1901-1984), grandson of Mariposa County pioneer John Sevier Branson. Ivan was born in Mariposa in a house his parents, Alvin Thorpe Branson and Mary Eliza Simmons Branson, were renting from Elias Newton Gann. As a young man in the 1920s, Ivan wrote travel articles for Motorland magazine, and may have used his own camera to capture this scene to accompany one of those article submissions, though he may have taken the picture simply to have a memento of his favorite boyhood candy store. (The soda fountain doubled as a candy store.) Note the dirt street. Apparently in 1925 the streets of Mariposa were still unpaved.

photo courtsey of Dave Smeds