Francis Marion Martin, known as the “Swamp Fox of Navarro,” was a 19th century Texas politician who served as lieutenant governor from 1883 to 1885. Born in Kentucky in 1830 and orphaned early, he was raised by the Hodge family of Livingston County and married Mary Catherine Hodge in 1849. Chosen to lead the Hodge family’s move to Texas, he went to Chatfield’s Springs in northeast Navarro County and moved his family there in 1853, later becoming a successful horse breeder and farmer in Wadesville. In 1858 he campaigned for U.S. Senator Sam Houston and entered Texas politics, winning election to the Texas State Senate in 1859 as a National Democrat because of his Houston connection. He served as one of the county enrolling officers and as captain of the militia company for Rush Creek in Beat No. 3, lost his senate seat in the 1861 election, and entered the Confederate Army in 1862, where he was elected captain of his cavalry company, though frail health kept him home for much of the war. Widowed in 1869 and remarried in 1877 to Angie Harle, he returned to public life after Reconstruction as a constitutional convention delegate in 1875, later won a state senate seat as a Democrat representing Navarro County, took pride in being a “farmer-senator,” and was elected president pro tem of the senate with farm organization support. After failing to win the governorship in 1886 and 1888, he became a Populist Party leader, and he died at his home in Corsicana in 1903.