James Thomas Holt

The Honey Grove Cotton Oil Mill that Holt backed turned a gin's waste into money. The Handbook of Texas explains that cottonseed is reduced to four products: linters, hulls, oil and meal. Out of every ton, hulls make up over a quarter of the weight, meal about 45 percent and oil about 16 percent. By 1900 cottonseed processing was the second most important industry in Texas by value, behind only lumber. A freighter who invested his profits in a mill, a bank and a water system was putting money behind a farm town's pipes and payroll.

What the plaque says

James Thomas Holt (Aug. 21, 1841 - Sept. 4, 1919) A native Virginian, James Thomas ("Tank") Holt came to Fannin County with his parents in 1849. After serving in the Confederate cavalry during the Civil War (1861-65), he started a freighting operation. He invested his profits in such ventures as ranching, the Honey Grove Cotton Oil Mill, and Planters National Bank. He built Honey Grove's first public water system and owned a store and hotel in Mineral Wells. Married to Margaret Elizabeth Self (1843-1928), he had four children. (1978)

Where it stands

Worth the stop nearby

• Sam Rayburn House State Historic Site — 18 mi
  The two-story farmhouse west of Bonham that the longtime Speaker of the House built in 1916 and kept as his home, left as he lived in it and open as a museum since 1975.
• Sam Bell Maxey House State Historic Site — 21 mi
  The Italian-villa-style house in Paris, finished in 1868 with a lawyer's fees, where a Confederate major general turned U.S. senator and two later generations of his family lived.
• Evergreen Cemetery — 21 mi
  Paris's town cemetery since 1866, with a carved-stone gallery that includes the Babcock monument in cowboy boots, and the grave of the three-year-old whose death led to the 1893 lynching of Henry Smith.
• Cooper Lake State Park — 22 mi
  Two units on Jim Chapman Lake, a Corps reservoir proposed in the late 1930s, stalled by a lawsuit until 1984 and dedicated in 1991, with a 10.5-mile equestrian trail and wildlife land around it.

More markers nearby

• James G. Gilmer — steps away
• Samuel Augustus Erwin — steps away
• Oakwood Cemetery — steps away
• Erwin Evans Smith — 0.2 mi