James Rufus Gilstrap came to Texas at the age of 30 and settled in the Henry Prairie community. His ancestry dated from the 1700's, when Oglethorpe settled a colony in Georgia. Gilstrap died in 1923, at the age of 81. As a young man he had served the South in the Civil War and after coming to Texas in the 1870's, he operated a large farm and gin. J. R. Gilstrap and his wife, Tennessee Patton Gilstrap, were survived by ten children.

William Lipscomb, born in 1821, settled in Englewood in the late 1860's. Lipscomb's son, W. T. Lipscomb, was a respected Robertson County teacher, and another son, S. J. Lipscomb, owned extensive land; he sold the trustees of the Franklin Corporation the land on which the public school at Franklin is built.

William Wesley Hurley, born in 1818, married Mary Anne Pettigrew in 1850, and the couple moved to Texas and settled on Duck Creek in Robertson County. Hurley fought in the Civil War, during which time his wife, assisted by Wash Riley, worked eighteen slaves on the family plantation. After the war, Major Hurley moved his family to Owensville, where he operated a store until the time of his death, by yellow fever, in 1873.

Hurley's daughter, Emma, married Dr. R. S. Glass, a pioneer teacher and physician who later became the first president of the First National Bank in Franklin. Another daughter, Jessie, married J. S. Scott, who was a farmer. A son, Jeff, lived in the Ridge community; and Edgar, who married Ethel Mauk, served for fifty years as a steward in the Franklin Methodist Church before his death in 1961. The story of a "Hurley Store in the Franklin area," covers a century; the first at Owensville, then at Ridge, and finally, at Franklin. Several of the, Hurley family are buried at Owensville.

Benjamin L. Parten, Sr., a graduate of the University of Texas in law, moved to Franklin from Calvert in 1921. He was a native of Madison County, Texas, the son of Oscar Asa and Mary Bord Parten. Parten was a distinguished attorney, a former county attorney, a Methodist and a Mason. He was married to Mary Lucille Wiley May 23, 1917. They had one son, Ben L. Parten, Jr., who joined his father in the law firm of Parten & Parten in 1950. Mr. Parten died May 29, 1958 and is buried in the Franklin cemetery.

Robert Cole settled in Robertson County shortly after the Civil War, farmed for a time, and married Margaret Graham. When Franklin became a town in 1882, Cole became its first mayor. A son of Robert and Margaret Cole, Robert Wyles Cole became a prosperous Robertson County rancher; his wife was Elizabeth Taylor Cole and they had six children. Robert Cole, Jr. organized the Franklin Telephone Company and Margaret Cole was a civic leader of the community.

Of the six children of the Cole family, Dr. Robert Taylor Cole is a professor of social science at Duke University; Dr. Thomas C. Cole is a physician in Huntsville, Texas; Frank E. Cole is a former state senator in Louisiana; Dr. Fred C. Cole, a former president of Washington and Lee University, is associated with the Ford Foundation; Luther Cole, of Franklin, is a rancher; and Margaret Cole, the only daughter of Robert W. Cole, is the wife of Marion Elliott of Sonora, Texas.

William "Ace" Nickelson, Robertson County sheriff from 1933 to 1935, was born in 1884 and came to Texas with his parents, W. H. and Sally Louise Nickelson, in 1896. The Nickelsons first settled in the Shiloh community near Franklin. Nickelson learned the land buying and selling business while employed by the South Dakota Texas Oil Company and later accepted residue deeds for "small and scattered parcels not transferred to regular buyers." In later years, Nickelson purchased other land and developed a sizeable ranch which is still owned by the family.