Holly Oaks

Holly Oaks was a slaveholding household as well as a judge's home. The 1860 slave schedule lists R. E. B. Baylor as owner of thirty-three enslaved people, only two of them men, and Baylor University's 2020 commission found that they formed a large part of his wealth. One of them, Ann Freeman, stayed in Independence after emancipation and was applauded from the stage at the 1939 unveiling of his statue in Waco. After the war he wrote a nephew that freed people had to be "forced to work in some way." Baylor never married.

What the plaque says

Holly Oaks Home of Dr. Robert Emmett Bledsoe Baylor (1791-1873). Here he resided for many years and here he died. Baylor University bears his name

Where it stands

Worth the stop nearby

• Independence and Old Baylor Park — 5.7 mi
  A crossroads north of Brenham that was the richest town in Texas when it won Baylor University in 1845, refused the railroad, and lost the college to Waco and Belton in 1886.
• Lake Somerville State Park and Trailway — 17 mi
  Two park units on an 11,000-acre lake between Austin and College Station, joined by a thirteen-mile trailway for hikers, cyclists and riders with primitive camps along the way.
• Washington-on-the-Brazos State Historic Site — 17 mi
  The townsite on the Brazos where delegates met in a cold, unfinished hall in March 1836 to declare Texas independent, with Independence Hall rebuilt and Anson Jones's Barrington farm worked as in 1850.
• Star of the Republic Museum — 17 mi
  A star-shaped museum of the Republic of Texas years, 1836 to 1846, built at Washington-on-the-Brazos after a Brenham campaign and opened on March 1, 1970.

More markers nearby

• Live Oak Female Seminary — 0.4 mi
• Oak Rest Cemetery and Site of Prospect Presbyterian Church — 0.8 mi
• La Bahia Road — 2.2 mi
• St. Peter's Lutheran Church — 2.4 mi