His father, Henry Martin Munger, ran a sawmill and cotton gin there, and his boyhood included working in those enterprises.

[1] For a decade and a half after 1865, the end of the Civil War, a number of innovative features became widely used for ginning in the United States.

Robert and his wife, Mary Collett, later moved to Mexia, Texas, built a system gin, and obtained related patents.

However, the selling point for most gin owners was the accompanying cost savings while producing cotton both more speedily and of higher quality.

In 1890, Munger moved to Birmingham, Alabama to build a factory there to avoid freight charges to the east and to meet increasing demand.

With additional investors, the Birmingham factory became the Northington-Munger-Pratt Company, which became the largest producer of cotton ginning machinery east of the Mississippi.

At that point, a group of investors led by Ernest Woodruff of Atlanta bought a controlling interest in Continental Gin.

The subdivision employed deed restrictions, a common practice in the United States today, but considered innovative at the time.

In particular, deeds for lots near Swiss Avenue required the houses to be so expensive that only the most wealthy of Dallas residents could afford them.

[15] Munger and Mary Collett moved to Birmingham and into the Mirabeau Swanson House in the Five Points South neighborhood in 1889.

In 1902, the family moved again, now outside of town to Arlington, an antebellum home that briefly had housed the headquarters of Union General James H. Wilson late in the Civil War.

Munger believed in the importance of exercise for all, among other things teaching his children to ride bicycles at very young ages.

[16] Munger's fascination with wheels for transportation attracted him to automobiles when autos began replacing the horse and buggy.