Robert M. Coleman (Texan politician)

Robert M. Coleman (1793 – July 1, 1837) was a Texan and later American politician, soldier, and aide-de-camp to Sam Houston. Coleman was a signer of the Texas Declaration of Independence, a Colonel, and a transitional founder of the Republic of Texas into the United States as a constituent state. His opposition to the strategies of Sam Houston regarding defense of the Alamo, and troop placements on up through the Battle of San Jacinto caused a rift with Houston and a posturing treatise, lending suspicion to the untimely death of Coleman by drowning.

He was appointed one of the first Texas Rangers, whose outpost, Coleman's Fort, was later named Fort Colorado.[1][2]

On February 1, 1858, he became the posthumous namesake of Coleman County, Texas and thus apparently also Coleman City, Coleman Lake, and eventually many other features, places, businesses, and identifiers in Coleman County.[3][4]

Earlier writers on Coleman include Noah Smithwick, a contemporary frontiersman, stationed at Coleman's Fort, having an awareness of Coleman in Smithwick's book 'Recollections of old Texas Days'.[5] Robert M. Coleman may have ancestral heritage from the often cited proposed Mobjack-Coleman lineage of colonial Virginia.[6]

It is implied that his family's association with Sam Houston may have begun back in Appalachian Virginia near Rockbridge Timber Plantation from where the Sam Houston family migrated. It is adjacent to a Coleman Mountain and Coleman Falls in southwest Amherst County and Nelson County where some of the Mobjack-Coleman lineage settled, both being typically Irish surnames.