Maggie and Herod "Pap" Simpson

Maggie Simpson's hotel years spanned Holliday's whole boom. After the hard winter of 1905, the town shipped some of Archer County's largest loads: 2,400 cowhides in 1906 and forty carloads of steers in 1907. The 1911 drought drove many settlers away. Then in 1916 the Panther oilfield opened four miles from town, and Holliday grew from about 219 people in 1925 to 1,500 and a bank by 1928. It had shrunk by 1933, when it incorporated with about 786 people, and the first census figure, in 1940, was 798.

What the plaque says

The town of Holliday was officially organized near Holliday Creek in 1890, when the city was platted. The Wichita Valley Railway was built through the area, and a post office was established. In that same year, Maggie Elizabeth Holt and H.W. Simpson were married in Archer County. Herod Michael Simpson was born to the couple on August 1, 1892. In 1894, H.W. Simpson left with a crew to drive cattle to Dodge City, Kansas, and was never heard from again. Maggie Simpson remained in Holliday, where in 1907 she purchased a hotel, which she owned and managed until her death on June 18, 1946. Herod M. Simpson died on January 23, 1963. Both were interred at Holliday Cemetery. (2009)

Where it stands

Worth the stop nearby

• Kell House Museum — 13 mi
  The 1909 Classic Revival house of Frank Kell, the miller and railroad builder who helped make Wichita Falls a city, shown by guided tour with its family furniture still in place.
• World's Littlest Skyscraper — 14 mi
  A four-story brick tower in downtown Wichita Falls, 40 feet tall and 10 feet wide, the leftover of a 1919 oil-boom office deal in which, the story goes, investors misread inches as feet.
• Royal Theater — 16 mi
  Archer City's movie house, burned in 1965, given a false front for The Last Picture Show and brought back by the town in the 1990s as a working stage on Main Street.
• Lake Arrowhead State Park — 18 mi
  A prairie park on the north shore of the Wichita Falls water-supply lake, which drowned the town of Halsell in 1965-66, with mesquite campsites, a lighted pier and more than 200 bird species.

More markers nearby

• First Methodist Church of Holliday — 0.2 mi
• Captain John Holliday — 1.7 mi
• Dad's Corner — 4.7 mi
• Van Dorn Trail — 5.6 mi