Robert L. and Julia Martin Hunter
Pearland, Brazoria County, Texas
Marker Inscription
ROBERT LEE HUNTER AND JULIA IVA MARTIN HAD ROOTS IN PEARLAND AS EARLY AS THE 1890s WHEN THE AREA WAS KNOWN AS MARK BELT. ROBERT LEE HUNTER WAS BORN TO JOSEPHINE BONAPARTE ESTES AND THOMAS JOHNSON HUNTER ON NOVEMBER 16, 1869 IN FORT BEND COUNTY ON A PLANTATION STARTED IN THE 1820s BY HIS GRANDFATHER, DR. JOHNSON CALHOUN HUNTER, ONE OF AUSTIN’S OLD THREE HUNDRED. DR. HUNTER BUILT A LARGE HOME FOR HIS FAMILY. FOLLOWING THE PASSING OF HIS PARENTS, ROBERT L. HUNTER TOOK UP RESIDENCE IN THE CABIN AT HUNTER’S PLANTATION. AROUND 1903, HUNTER SOLD HIS PLANTATION HOLDINGS AND MOVED TO PEARLAND IN BRAZORIA COUNTY TO BE NEAR HIS SISTER, EUNICE, AND TO START IN THE CATTLE BUSINESS WITH HER HUSBAND AND SUCCESSFUL RANCHER, WILLIAM T. “BILLY” MAGEE. JULIA IVA MARTIN WAS BORN IN RED CLOUD, NEBRASKA ON MAY 15, 1883 TO ELMIRA MONSELLE [MUNSELL] MARTIN AND SAMUEL PLEASANT MARTIN. THE MARTINS CAME TO TEXAS IN 1894 AND SETTLED IN MARK BELT (PEARLAND). IN PEARLAND, ROBERT HUNTER MARRIED JULIA MARTIN ON SEPTEMBER 27, 1905 AND, FROM 1906 TO 1919, THEY HAD FOUR CHILDREN. THE FAMILY RESIDED IN A HOME ON ORANGE STREET. THE HUNTERS WERE WELL KNOWN AND RESPECTED IN PEARLAND AND, ACCORDING TO ONE OF THEIR DAUGHTERS, REGULARLY OFFERED ADVICE AND HOSPITALITY TO FORMER SLAVES. ROBERT LEE HUNTER DIED IN THE OLD HUNTER HOUSE ON JANUARY 18, 1941 AND JULIA IVA MARTIN HUNTER DIED IN HOUSTON ON MAY 6, 1970. BOTH ARE BURIED IN SOUTH PARK CEMETERY. IN 2008, THE CITY OF PEARLAND CHANGED THE NAME OF ORANGE STREET PARK WHICH COMPRISED PART OF THE HUNTER HOMESTEAD TO ROBERT L. AND JULIA MARTIN HUNTER PARK. DESCENDANTS OF THE MARTIN AND HUNTER FAMILIES STILL LIVE IN PEARLAND.
Erected by Texas Historical Commission
The Story
Robert Lee Hunter descended from Dr. Johnson Calhoun Hunter, one of Stephen F. Austin's Old Three Hundred colonists, and grew up on the family's Fort Bend County plantation. Around 1903 he sold his holdings and moved to Pearland, then known as Mark Belt, to raise cattle with his brother-in-law, and in 1905 he married Nebraska-born Julia Iva Martin, whose family had settled the area in 1894. Respected community members remembered for offering advice and hospitality to former slaves, the couple later had a Pearland park named in their honor.
Why it matters
The Hunters link the founding Anglo colonization of Texas to the ranching and town-building of the early twentieth century, tracing one family's arc across nearly a century of Brazoria County history.
The story behind this marker
AI contextThe era
In the decades bracketing 1900, the flat coastal prairie of Brazoria County was still being remade from open range into farms, ranches, and railroad towns. What is now Pearland was then called Mark Belt, a scatter of settlement on the Gulf plain south of Houston, where new rail lines were pulling in families looking to raise cattle and put down roots.
This was Texas in its Reconstruction-and-Gilded-Age middle age, a generation removed from the frontier but still close enough to touch it. The people arriving here in the 1890s and early 1900s were often the children and grandchildren of the first Anglo colonists, carrying family memory of the land grants and plantations that had opened the region decades before.
Against that backdrop, the story of one couple who met and married in this young town captures the whole sweep — from the earliest colonial settlement of the Texas coast to the ordinary town life of the early twentieth century.
People & events
Robert Lee Hunter was born in 1869 in Fort Bend County, on a plantation his grandfather, Dr. Johnson Calhoun Hunter, had begun back in the 1820s. That grandfather was one of Stephen F. Austin's Old Three Hundred — the first families licensed to settle the young Anglo colony in Mexican Texas — and he built a substantial home for his family there.
After his parents died, Robert lived for a time in the cabin on the old family place. Around 1903 he sold his plantation holdings and moved to Pearland to be near his sister Eunice and to enter the cattle business with her husband, the rancher William T. "Billy" Magee. Two years later, on September 27, 1905, he married Julia Iva Martin, a young woman born in Red Cloud, Nebraska in 1883 whose family had come to Texas in 1894 and settled at Mark Belt.
Robert and Julia raised four children between 1906 and 1919 in a home on Orange Street. By the account of one of their daughters, they were remembered not just as respected townspeople but for regularly offering advice and hospitality to former slaves — a small, human detail that says a great deal about how they were known. Robert died in the old Hunter house in 1941; Julia lived until 1970. Both rest in South Park Cemetery, and their descendants still live in Pearland.
Its place in the American story
One family's arc here traces a thread that runs through the whole American frontier story. The Old Three Hundred were part of the first organized wave of Anglo-American settlement into what was then Mexican territory — the leading edge of a westward push that would, within a generation, reshape the map of the continent.
What makes this marker resonant is that it doesn't stop at the founding. It follows the same bloodline from a 1820s colonial plantation into the cattle business and town-building of the early 1900s. That is the real texture of westward expansion: not a single dramatic moment, but families carrying land, labor, and reputation forward across the better part of a century.
The glimpse of the Hunters extending hospitality to formerly enslaved neighbors also gestures, quietly, at the harder and more complicated history bound up in those founding plantations — a reminder that the American frontier story was never a simple one.
If you visit
Pearland today is a busy suburb on Houston's southern edge, and part of what makes this marker worth a stop is the way it lets you read the older town beneath the newer one. The land that was once the Hunter homestead along Orange Street became a city park, renamed in the couple's honor in 2008.
Stand there and you're standing on ground that connects two very different Texases — the open cattle country of Mark Belt and the modern suburb that grew over it. It's a good place to slow down and think about how quickly a frontier settlement can become a neighborhood.
If you're building a road trip through Brazoria County's layered history, this is an easy, low-key first stop: a neighborhood park with a long memory. Pair it with the county's other early-settlement and coastal-town markers to trace how the whole region filled in, family by family.
Written by AI to add context, grounded in the marker’s inscription and the historical record. The inscription above is the original, unaltered text.
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Related people
- · Robert Lee Hunter
- · Julia Iva Martin Hunter
- · Dr. Johnson Calhoun Hunter
Themes & tags
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