Robertson Home
Salado, Bell County, Texas
Marker Inscription
Built by Col. E.S.C. Robertson and wife, Mary Elizabeth (Dickey). Rare ante-bellum plantation complex, comprising home, servant quarters, land, family cemetery, stables. Still a working ranch. The house, occupied by fifth generation of Robertsons, is an example of Classical Revival style. Shows Palladian influence in its recessed porches and gallery rooms forming terminal pavillions balancing a central gabled portico. Recorded Texas Historic Landmark, 1967
Erected by Texas Historical Commission
The Story
Built by Col. E. S. C. Robertson and his wife Mary Elizabeth, this rare antebellum plantation complex still includes the home, quarters, cemetery, and stables, and remains a working ranch occupied by later generations of the family. The Classical Revival house shows Palladian influences in its recessed porches and balanced pavilions. The surviving quarters are a reminder that plantations of this era were worked by enslaved labor.
Why it matters
Intact antebellum plantation complexes like this preserve the architecture and the harder truths of the pre-Civil War Southern economy in one place.
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Related people
- · E. S. C. Robertson
Themes & tags
Nearby & related markers
West Salado Cemetery
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West Salado Cemetery grew up in a community of former slaves who settled here after the Civil War, its earliest documented grave dating to 1877. In 1879, Elijah Sterling Clack Robertson deeded the land for a church, school, and graveyard—the trio of institutions freedpeople so often built to anchor their new lives. Though the church and school are long gone, the cemetery endures as a link to the area's early Black history.
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Founded on land first granted to a veteran of the Siege of Bexar, this cemetery began in 1890 with the burial of the Stocktons' fifteen-year-old son and grew alongside a family that settled Bell County in 1870. Among the more than eighty graves is Ead White, a formerly enslaved man who stayed with the family after the Civil War, and members lost to the deadly 1919 Corpus Christi hurricane.
African American Education in Belton
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Public education for Black students in Belton dates to 1882, when Mrs. Aleck McGee was hired "to teach the colored school." In 1890 Fisk University graduate Thomas Breckenridge Harris became the first instructor of the African American high school, and in 1936 a new building rose on this site for students of all grades, named T. W. Harris in his honor. The last class graduated in 1966, and Belton's schools integrated the following year.
Jeff Hamilton
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Born into slavery in Kentucky and brought to Texas as a child, Jeff Hamilton became the enslaved personal servant and companion in the household of Sam Houston, the revolutionary general and Texas statesman, serving through Houston's governorship and until Houston's death in 1863. Freed by emancipation, Hamilton spent more than fifty years in the Belton area and worked for decades as custodian of Mary Hardin-Baylor College. His remembered life offers a rare, intimate window onto one of Texas's most famous households from the vantage of the man enslaved within it.