The Houston Family, Eau Gallie's First Settlers — Melbourne, Florida

John Carroll Houston IV, born July 8, 1816, and died February 17, 1885, is recorded by the Eau Gallie Arts District history as the first permanent settler in the Eau Gallie area, arriving in 1859. That date puts the Houston homestead about a decade ahead of W. H. Gleason's 16,000-acre purchase and of the first recorded settlers at Crane Creek, which makes Eau Gallie the older of the two communities that joined as Melbourne in 1969.

The district history calls him a relative of Sam Houston. Before he settled, Houston had been sent to the area by the United States Army to determine how many Native Americans were still living there after the Third Seminole War. The Genealogical Society of South Brevard history by Weona Cleveland says he thought the country beautiful and productive and decided to live on the Indian River, so he obtained a discharge from the Army and came back to stay.

The settlement was built by forced labor. According to EGAD, Houston walked back on the Hernandez/Capron Trail in 1859 with his oldest son and 14 slaves, and they began clearing land and building a home on the Indian River shore. The Rossetter House Museum states that it is believed Houston had his enslaved workers build the first structure on the property where the Rossetter House now stands in Eau Gallie. The Florida Tech chronology of Brevard County cites the 1860 U.S. Census as counting 15 enslaved people in the entire county, out of 246 residents; the sources do not say how many of them lived in the Houston household.

Houston brought his wife, Mary Virginia Houston, and their other children in 1860. He named the place Arlington, after a community near Jacksonville where he had once lived. The cabin sat on a homestead of 160 acres that took in all the land north of Elbow Creek, the stream now called the Eau Gallie River, east to the Indian River and possibly west to Lake Washington, according to the district history.

Frontier life on the Eau Gallie homestead was spare. EGAD describes a house of crude logs chinked with clay and burnt oyster shells, and smoke from burning palmetto roots and green boughs used at night against mosquitoes. The family kept a sugar cane mill turned by a horse or oxen and also raised rice, crops suited to the wet ground along Elbow Creek.

The Arlington homestead served the Confederacy. The Rossetter House Museum history records that the Houstons operated a refuge and staging area for blockade runners carrying goods overland from the Indian River to the St. Johns River, and that Houston's son, also named John, was captured in 1864 while running the blockade. EGAD and the Genealogical Society both describe Houston as a Confederate sympathizer.

One episode from the war's end is told in both Eau Gallie histories. Confederate Secretary of War John C. Breckinridge, trying to escape Union forces and reach Cuba, sailed down the Indian River until his boat sprang a leak near Eau Gallie. He came ashore at the Houston dock and asked for help caulking the boat, and Houston gave it.

After the war, Houston took a role in county government. The museum states that he served as a Brevard County Commissioner during Reconstruction and established the second post office of Brevard County in 1871. In the late 1860s and the 1870s, the family worked as hosts and as hunting and fishing guides for wealthy northern sportsmen and naturalists who traveled the Indian River, an early form of the winter visitor trade that later shaped Eau Gallie and Melbourne.

Arlington did not keep its name. The Genealogical Society history says W. H. Gleason came to the area in the late 1860s and renamed the community Eau Gallie. The Houston homestead thus became the nucleus of the town Gleason platted around it.

The family burial ground is the oldest surviving Houston landmark in Melbourne. The museum states that the Houston Cemetery, located half a block south of the Rossetter House, was established in 1865 and that twelve graves remain. An unusual feature is the use of initialed footstones in addition to headstones, including one carved J.C.H.

The 19th-century family members buried there include John Carroll Houston, recorded on the museum's list as the first settler of Arlington and Eau Gallie, who died in 1885 at age 69; his wife Mary Virginia Houston, born in 1823, who died in 1894; and their son Samuel L. Houston, who died in 1883 at age 26. Infant children of the neighboring Roesch family are also buried on the Eau Gallie site.

The visible stones in the Houston Cemetery may not be the full count. In April 2010, a ground penetrating radar survey by John J. Schultz and Joanna Fletcher of the University of Central Florida Department of Anthropology marked eighteen anomalies in the field and found sixteen more after processing. The authors wrote that they would not be surprised if the anomalies represented at least 20 unmarked graves, while cautioning that some could be tree roots and that only invasive testing could confirm them.

The cemetery is one of three parts of the Historic Rossetter House Museum, alongside the 1908 James Wadsworth Rossetter House and the 1901 William R. Roesch House, according to the museum. The Florida Historical Society, which manages the complex, states that the Rossetter property was first settled by Eau Gallie pioneer John Houston and his family in 1859.

The Houston land changed hands as Eau Gallie grew. The museum records that the Rossetter family arrived in Eau Gallie in 1902 and that James Wadsworth Rossetter bought the property in 1904, building his Highland Avenue house in 1908, when the town had about 200 residents. The museum's account notes that the nearby graves of the Houston family plantation stood as a reminder of the community's humble beginnings, and it was the Rossetter heirs' later bequest, rather than any Houston descendant, that kept the burial ground inside a protected museum property.

The family name also survives on the street grid. The City of Melbourne historic preservation page lists locally designated resources along Houston Street in the Eau Gallie Historic District, among them the Rossetter House at 1328 Houston Street and the Eau Gallie Yacht Club at 1149 Houston Street. The sources consulted document the Houston household through the late nineteenth century; this page does not trace later generations.