Holland Quarters Cemetery

A community history compiled for the 1996 marker dedication says the first burial behind the second Holland school was a baby girl born to William "Bud" Rayson and Betty Holland Rayson in December 1895. The Texas Freedom Colonies Project records that the Holland school enrolled 79 Black students in 1897. Betty Holland-Rayson died on September 6, 1919, and is remembered as the mother of the cemetery. The Handbook of Texas notes that Spearman Holland, the donor named on the plaque, reported a planter-size slaveholding in the 1850 census and had moved to Madison County by 1870.

What the plaque says

Holland Quarters Cemetery This African American cemetery is located on land deeded to former slaves by Spearman Holland after the Civil War. The site also included the Pine Grove Baptist Church, a school, and lodge hall. Though the site contains more than 500 graves, only a fourth are marked. The oldest documented burial is that of the unnamed infant twin daughter of William and Betty Holland Rayson in 1895. Buried here are former members of fraternal organizations and veterans of wars from World War I to the Vietnam War. This cemetery continues to serve the community. (1996)

Where it stands

Worth the stop nearby

• Tex Ritter Museum and Texas Country Music Hall of Fame — 4.9 mi
  Carthage's country music museum, with Tex Ritter's boots, guitars and saddles in a room styled like a movie theater, and exhibits on other Texas stars, Jim Reeves among them.
• East Texas Oil Museum — 30 mi
  A Kilgore College museum that rebuilds the 1930s oil boom in a full-scale Boomtown with a general store, drugstore and newspaper office, plus dioramas, films and antiques given by East Texans.

More markers nearby

• Ebenezer United Methodist Church — 1.6 mi
• Isaac R. Youngblood — 3.9 mi
• Central Baptist Church — 5.1 mi
• The Panola Watchman — 5.1 mi