Elijah Sterling Clack Robertson was born in Giles County, Tennessee, on August 23, 1820. His father, Empresario S.C. Robertson, brought him to Texas to learn Spanish and assist in his land office by translating and copying land grants into Spanish, work for which he received 14 league (1,107 acres) of land. When the Texas Revolution began in 1836, his father sent him by ox cart to the United States with land documents for safe-keeping. He was a captain in the Texas militia in 1842, when Mexico invaded Texas, and a colonel by 1844. After his first wife, the mother of three children, died, he married Mary E. Dickey in 1852, and together they had 12 children, making 15 children in all. In 1854 he began building his permanent home near Salado Springs on land he had first seen in 1835 at age 15 while passing through the area with a ranger company formed by his father to fight Indians. He was involved in founding Salado College and the town in 1859, served on General H. E. McCulloch's staff during the Civil War, devoted much of his postwar life to supporting Salado's educational systems and managing his business as a landowner, farmer, and rancher, served in the Texas Constitutional Convention in 1875, and died on October 8, 1879, after which he was buried at the Robertson Family Cemetery. His Salado home, begun about 1854 and completed several years later, is considered the most complete surviving example of a plantation complex in Texas, with a Greek Revival house, servants quarters, cemetery, and stables, 22 rooms, 11 native stone fireplaces, two staircases, and a front "stranger's" room for passersby that opens from the porch and does not lead into the rest of the house.