Holt Cemetery

Texas had let settlers buy four sections of pastureland from the public domain since 1887. The Four-Section Act of April 4, 1895, extended that to the sale or lease of up to four sections of school, asylum or public land, with three years of residence and improvements required. The Handbook of Texas says the law was meant to draw ranchers, but many farmers came and started wheat farms. Hutchinson County turned slowly: wheat covered about 1,900 acres in 1910, 8,400 in 1920 and 16,500 in 1930, while cattle fell from about 25,200 in 1920 to 15,300 in 1930.

What the plaque says

In the late 1890s Texas enacted colonization and homestead laws that significantly quickened the settlement of the then sparsely populated Panhandle region of North Texas. Hutchinson County soon recorded the required 150 applications for land purchases in the county to formally organize in 1901. In 1903 early county settlers Benjamin and Birda May (Kirk) Holt donated seven acres here to be used as the site of a community schoolhouse and cemetery. The first person buried here was Nola Storrs in 1909. A new schoolhouse was built here in 1916 and in 1917 the Holts legally recorded their 7-acre donation. Five acres were set aside for school purposes and two acres for the cemetery, which at that time contained about 11 gravesites. When Holt School trustees deeded the school's five acres and vacated schoolhouse to the Holt Cemetery Association in 1948, about an acre of this property was converted for cemetery use. In 1907 the cemetery association established policies governing the use of this site. The cemetery, which continues to serve the local community, contains the gravesites of many of this area's first settlers and those of veterans of World War I, World War II, and the Korean conflict. (1993)

Where it stands

Worth the stop nearby

• Hutchinson County Museum — 26 mi
  Borger's museum on the three-mile Main Street of a 1926 oil boom town that drew 45,000 people in ninety days and was put under martial law in 1929.

More markers nearby

• Drift Fence — steps away
• Lindberghs Land at Spearman — 11 mi
• Spearman — 12 mi
• Hansford County Sheriff Robert E. (Bob) Martin — 12 mi