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William Lawson Holder
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W.L.
Holder was one of the first to settle in Grayson County; the
family came from Alabama in ox wagons. He arrived around 1845
and
settled 4 miles west of Denison. Mr. and Mrs. Holder's cabin was
built in the early 1840s near the intersection of Crawford Street and
Harvey Lane in Denison. The cabin actually is the Cold Springs
School. The school house was moved to Frontier Village in 1972.
Mr.
and Mrs. Holder were among the first six families to settle in Grayson
county. They lived in tents for two years, waiting for their land
grants to be approved by the Republic of Texas. W.L. Holder owned 900 acres; he later fenced off 80 acres
with split rails in order to raise corn and cotton.
The men
went to Shreveport,
Louisiana once each year to buy sugar, coffee, salt and flour, lead
& powder to mold their bullets. They killed wild
game to eat
- deer, turkey, prairie chickens and quails. The
family's
clothing was made from cotton and deer skins. They raised
food to
eat, such as corn.
The little community built a school for their children, known as
the Cold Springs School, is believed to be the first school in the
county.
He
and his sons built the first school from logs in the area, around 1855.
Clifton Lafayette Holder, the third of eleven children born
to
W.L. Holder and Maryon Looney, was raised in the Preston Bend area.
At one time his family even lived in the old log schoolhouse,
Cold
Springs. The
first teacher, Maudie Mangrum, slept in the loft and ate with families
of her students. A fireplace was the only way the building could
be heated. The building had and still has split-log benches for
the children to sit on. There are holes in some of the logs and
the story handed down by the Holder descendants is that pegs were
inserted into the holes with planks laid across them to serve as desks
or shelves.
The Holder Family Home, built ca1880
Back row, left to right: Clinton Lafayette Holder (father), born 1845; Commanche Delaware Holder (mother), born 1857, Eulah Morrison Holder, Beulah Holder Nichols, Charles Frederick Holder, Rufus Irving Holder Front row, left to right: Lawson Lafayette Holder, Gladys Holder Kibler, Nancy L. Holder Evans, Jerry Bledsoe Holder Photograph taken ca1896
BIOGRAPHY INDEX
COLD SPRINGS SCHOOLHOUSE
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