(1855 - 1939)
Printed with permission of the French Legation
Miss Lillie was named after her mother. She was the seventh child born to Joseph Robertson and his second wife Lydia Robertson, on November 3rd, 1855. Lillie would spend her entire life in her childhood home, inheriting the historic Legation house after her mother passed away in 1902.
Lillie was an active, early Austin preservationist. She was a founding member of the William B. Travis chapter of the Daughters of the Republic of Texas, an organization that continues to work to preserve the legacy of the Republic of Texas. As a founding member of the DRT, Lillie was one of the leading figures in establishing a museum inside the current Texas State Capitol which housed items from the Republic-era of Texas that were collected by the DRT. She was also involved in the movement to preserve the Alamo in San Antonio and the Old Land Office in Austin. She played an important role in transferring the DRT’s collection of artifacts from inside the Capitol to its new home inside the Old Land Office in the early 1920’s. It was at this time that Emma Kyle Burleson donated items of furniture that had once belonged to Alphonse Dubois at the French Legation, to the DRT’s new museum in the Old Land Office. Lillie even managed to persuade the caretaker at the Texas State Cemetery to let members of the DRT assist in the grounds keeping and upkeep of the memorials at the state’s official burial ground.
Though Lillie never married, she remained an active member of the Austin community throughout her entire life. As a lifelong member of St. David’s Episcopal church, she taught Sunday school to generations of Austin children. She was joined in the childhood home by her widowed sister Sarah in the 1930’s, when the Works Progress Administration conducted the first historic survey of the Legation house for the Historic Architectural Building Survey. At the time of her passing, she was survived by fourteen nieces and nephews, most of whom lived in Travis County. Lillie was buried next to her parents, sister Julia, and brother George, in the Robertson family plot in Oakwood Cemetery, one mile north of where she spent her life at the French Legation.
It was Miss Lillie’s passion for Texas history that inspired her to open her childhood home to the public, offering guided tours of the historic home which she referred to as the “Old French Embassy.” During these tours, she would share the stories of Alphonse Dubois’ misadventures in the new capital city, which had been passed down to her from her parents who witnessed the drama of the Pig War firsthand eighty years earlier. Its thanks to Lillie’s storytelling, and the sharing of her family’s oral histories of life in early Austin, that the Legation house was remembered as a place of historic significance, inspiring her surviving family and members of the DRT to have the property purchased by the state of Texas to be preserved for future generations.
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