Branch, Mary Lydia Bolles (1840–1922)

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Branch, Mary Lydia Bolles (1840–1922)

American children's writer. Born Mary Lydia Bolles, June 1840, in New London, Connecticut; died 1922; m. John Locke Branch; children: Anna Hempstead Branch (poet and social worker).

Known primarily for stories and poems for children, served as assistant editor of Saturday Evening Post in Philadelphia, PA (1865); best-known poem is "The Petrified Fern."