Mary Ellen Robertson
The First Mother of Leesburg
Our Chapter's Namesake
 
Meet Leesburg's first mother, Mary Ellen Morrison Robertson. She came in 1848 from her native South Carolina and married John Marmaduke Robertson, the twenty-six year old son of Thomas M. Robertson, first white settler in what is now Lake County. Mary Ellen was fifteen at the time of her marriage and sixteen when she had her first child. A faded tintype taken about the time of her wedding shows her as a pudgy teen-ager in a long, flowing dress, holding what might be a Bible. She died in 1862, at twenty-nine, after having given birth to her seventh baby. No written record survives, but from what is known we have some idea of Mary Ellen's short, sad life. She lived in a log house built by her husband and father-in-law on the present site of First Federal Savings Bank of Lake County. There was no town, no stores, schools, or churches. Nor were there roads, only trails for horse or pedestrian traffic. Commerce was mostly by boat to and from a long pier that jutted into Lake Griffin. People hunted and fished and grew vegetables, even made their own sugar from cane. In the 1850s the Robertsons must have grown weary of their wilderness privation. They sold their land stake to the Fussell family and moved. Thomas moved to Moss Bluff, where he is buried, and John moved eastward where he founded Whitney and Montclair.
(Source: Emmett Peter, Jr. Papers by Emmett B. Peter.)