Nellie Gray Robertson

Nellie Gray Robertson (February 28, 1894 – May 20, 1955) was a lawyer and jurist in Texas. She was nominated to the All-Woman Supreme Court of 1925, though she did not serve in the position. She was the first female county attorney in the state.

Life and career Robertson was a native of Granbury, and was the youngest of six children of William Jarrett and Arminda Barton Robertson. Her father left the family soon after her birth, and her mother struggled with poverty as he drifted in and out of her life for some years before dying in Louisiana in 1910. Nellie's elder brothers provided for the family; her mother was eligible for a Confederate widow's pension, but she did not begin to get money from it until 1937.

Robertson graduated from Granbury High School in 1912 and, determined to study law, enrolled in the University of Texas at Austin that fall; women in Texas would not begin to be licensed as attorneys until the following year. That year she became the state's first female county attorney; she had run unopposed in the Democratic Party primary in July, and in November received 446 out of 448 votes cast. She ran again in 1920, prevailing over her primary opponent and running unopposed in the general election. As the role of county attorney was only a part-time one, in 1921 Robertson opened the Hood County Abstract Company, whose owner and operator she remained until 1925. Robertson proved sanguine about her position; when asked how she felt about missing the chance to be remembered as the first female chief justice on a United States high court, she responded simply, "It is what it is." also in that town she practiced law as a member of the firm of Stewart, Burgess, Morris & Robertson. She was an associate lay leader for the local district of the Central Texas Methodist Conference, and a grand matron of the Order of the Eastern Star as well. In her private life she was known for her skill at poker.

Robertson never married. She retired in 1954 and died the next year of complications from diabetes; she is interred in the Granbury Cemetery. She had died in Granbury while visiting from Beaumont. In 2015 a Texas Historical Commission marker was erected in her honor in her hometown, before the courthouse where she had practiced and had her office.