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

The Historic Rossetter House Museum credits John Carroll Houston, who lived from 1816 until 1885 and died at 69, with being the first settler of the place that became Eau Gallie, now inside the City of Melbourne.

The museum, a project of the Florida Historical Society and The Rossetter House Foundation, says the Houston family were among the earliest settlers in Brevard County, calling their homestead Arlington in 1859, and that the name was later changed to Eau Gallie. The Florida Historical Society, which manages the museum property, likewise states that the Rossetter property was first settled by Eau Gallie pioneer John Houston and his family in 1859. Today the old Eau Gallie core is part of Melbourne: the city's Historic Preservation page lists the Eau Gallie Historic District among Melbourne's locally designated historic resources.

"First settler" here means the first in the American settlement record. The state's Pentoya marker at Ballard Park places the Ais town of Pentoaya on the Indian River Lagoon where the Eau Gallie and Indian rivers meet, with artifacts dating from as early as 2000 BC to as late as AD 1700. A second state marker, for the Winter-Time Ais Indian Town of Pentoaya, records that Lt. Alvaro Mexia noted the town during a 1605 diplomatic mission to the Ais, more than 250 years before the Houstons arrived.

The Houston family settled Arlington in 1859, and the museum states it is believed that John Carroll Houston had his slaves build the first structure on the property that is now the Rossetter House.

The museum places the homestead within a farming frontier: it writes that Eau Gallie was founded in the 1850s around agricultural ventures including sugar cane, rice and citrus groves, and it refers to the graves nearby as those of the Houston family plantation. The sources fetched for this page do not give the size of the homestead, the number of enslaved people held there or the names of those who did the work, and the museum's own wording, "it is believed," signals that the account of the first building is a tradition rather than a documented record.

The museum records that during the Civil War the Houstons operated a refuge and staging area for blockade runners transporting goods from the Indian River to the St. Johns River.

Houston's son, also named John, was captured in 1864 while running the blockade, according to the same museum history. After the war Houston took a role in county government: the museum states that he served as a Brevard County Commissioner during Reconstruction, which it dates 1864 to 1874, and that he established the second post office of Brevard County in 1871.

The Arlington household also earned a living from visitors. In the late 1860s and the 1870s, the museum says, the Houstons served as hosts and as hunting and fishing guides for wealthy northern sportsmen and naturalists, an early form of the Indian River visitor trade that the museum later describes arriving in Eau Gallie by rail.

The Eau Gallie name came from Gleason, a later arrival who bought a 16,000-acre tract in Brevard County in 1870 and named it Eau Gallie, according to the state's Gleason House marker.

William Henry Gleason, the marker says, came from Wisconsin. It explains the name as "Eau" from Gleason's hometown of Eau Claire, Wisconsin, meaning water, and "Gallie," a derivative of a Seminole word meaning rocky. Gleason moved his family to Eau Gallie in 1882, three years before Houston's death in 1885, and in 1887, Gleason convinced Henry Flagler to extend his railroad to Eau Gallie by offering right-of-way through the area. The Rossetter House Museum adds that by 1893 Eau Gallie had become the southern end of Flagler's Florida East Coast Railway, attracting new visitors from the north, and that when James Rossetter built his Highland Avenue home in 1908 the town had about 200 people, a hotel and a commercial district on the Indian River.

The family burial ground dates to 1865 and sits half a block south of the Rossetter House, where twelve graves remain today, according to the museum.

Some Houston graves in Eau Gallie carry two stones: a headstone and a small footstone cut with the person's initials, one of them reading J.C.H. for the patriarch. The museum's burial list names these Houston relatives:

Read as a family record, the list spans three generations of Eau Gallie Houstons, from the settler couple to grandchildren who died as infants in the early 1900s; Samuel died at 26, two years before his father. The same ground also takes in children of the Roesch household, whose 1901 house is now part of the museum.

Radar suggests the Eau Gallie plot holds more people than its stones name. A University of Central Florida anthropology team, John J. Schultz and Joanna Fletcher, scanned it in April 2010: 18 anomalies flagged in the field plus 16 found in the processed data, all resembling the signals from marked graves. Their conclusion, quoted by the museum, put the likely number of unmarked burials at 20 or more, with no invasive testing recommended to prove it.

The Houston family cemetery is one of three parts of the Historic Rossetter House Museum in Eau Gallie, which also takes in the 1908 Rossetter House and gardens and the 1901 Roesch House.

The Florida Historical Society says the Rossetter family arrived in Eau Gallie in 1902, that James Wadsworth Rossetter bought the property in 1904, and that the house is restored as it stood in 1908. Before their deaths, Caroline and Ella Rossetter donated the family home and its collection of Victorian antiques to the Rossetter House Foundation, which owns the property, while the Florida Historical Society manages it and offers guided tours. The museum describes the nearby Houston graves as a reminder of the humble beginnings of the community.

The museum complex is also a city landmark. Melbourne's Historic Preservation page lists 1328 Houston Street and 1365 Highland Avenue (Rossetter House) among its locally designated resources, and the Eau Gallie Historic District includes properties at 1296, 1266, 1221, 1211, 1199 and 1149 Houston Street. The sources consulted document the Houston household through the early twentieth century burials; this page does not trace later generations.

Visitors looking for the Houston graves should not confuse them with the city-run Eau Gallie Cemetery. Melbourne's Cemeteries page lists that separate municipal ground at 992 Masterson St., with its by-appointment cemetery office on Harper Road, while the Houston plot is part of the Rossetter House Museum grounds.

Last verified: October 15, 2026, against the Rossetter House Museum's history and burial list, the Florida Historical Society's Rossetter History page, Melbourne's Historic Preservation and Cemeteries pages, and the state's Gleason House, Pentoya and Winter-Time Pentoaya markers.