How Branson Got Its Name
Near Branson, Missouri
The town you are driving through takes its name from a storekeeper. In eighteen eighty-two, a man named Reuben Branson opened a general store and post office in this area, and later he moved his operation down toward the confluence of Roark Creek and the White River. For a time the little settlement here was actually called Lucia.
But the real turning point was the railroad. When the White River Railway pushed through in the early nineteen hundreds, rival land speculators bought up ground and platted competing townsites. The Branson Town Company, headed by a railroad immigration agent named Charles Fulbright, filed its plat in October of nineteen oh three, just weeks after the rival Lucia plat.
When it became clear the tracks would run only through the Branson company's land, the Lucia owners gave up and sold out. The name Branson won. The White River line was completed in nineteen oh five, and the town was formally incorporated in nineteen twelve, the same era the nearby Powersite Dam was rising on the river.
A store, a railroad, and a name that stuck.
