Sandra Holland, Special to Pleasanton Express - Wednesday, October 13, 2004
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His father, the late Jim Holland, had said that Gasper was
1/16th Cherokee, something that is still unproven, though it is believed to be through a great-grandmother Norris. While stationed at Kelly Air Force Base, Jim met Gasper’s mother, the late Virginia DiPaola Holland, who grew up in San Antonio and was the only child of Sicilian immigrants Gasper and Rose Pachienche DiPaola. As for the rest of the Hollands, Gasper assumed they were all “Arkansas hillbillies.”
Then on that Sunday in May, a first cousin in Arkansas showed him five notebooks of family history compiled by another cousin. While looking over it, he and his wife Sandra were given eleven photocopied pages before a family gathering started. These pages took the Holland name back to the immigrants in the early 1700s and named some more of the women who married into the family.
On one of the sheets, it mentioned the siblings of his ancestor Frederick. Two of the brothers had unusual names, Spearman and Bird.
The next day, Memorial Day, as they were driving home, they picked up the Dallas Morning News. Sandra was reading about a black Medal of Honor winner in the Civil War. His name was Milton Holland, a common enough name. Then it mentioned his father, Bird, and his uncle and former slaveholder, Spearman, both living in Texas. Bird, a white man, had purchased the freedom of several of his sons from his half-brother Spearman “Major” Holland, and sent them to Ohio for an education. Bird’s sons by an unknown slave woman--Milton, James and William--fought for the union. Spearman and Bird fought for the South, along with other relatives. Bird died in a battle in Louisiana and is buried in Austin.
Sandra exclaimed, “Gasper! Some of your relatives are on the front page of the Dallas Morning News!”
If their trip to Arkansas had been any other weekend, if they had not purchased the newspaper or read the article, if they had not gone through Dallas on Memorial Day, then they would not have learned about the connection with unknown cousins.
Over a decade ago, a school group from Carthage, Texas visited the Institute of Texan Cultures in San Antonio. There, the students from the all-white school learned of a black Medal of Honor winner who had been born near Carthage. No one in Panola County knew the story because Milton was serving in the Army from Ohio when he received the honor. Local researchers began working on it. Milton Holland turned out to be the brother of an ancestor of Eva Holland Johns-Chadwick from Holland Quarters, a community near Carthage in East Texas.
The Dallas Morning News article that Gasper and Sandra read was about the plaque honoring Milton that Mrs. Chadwick purchased for a local park. When asked if she was surprised to have a white ancestor, the retired school teacher replied, “No, but I’m surprised to learn that he purchased his sons’ freedom from slavery. It seems that, in that day, that was unheard of. It was such a wonderful thing to do.”
When Gasper and Sandra got home, after several phone calls to Hollands in Carthage, they located Eva Chadwick. She would be attending a teachers’ conference in Austin in late July, so they arranged to meet there.
Peter Holland was born in 1686 and fathered William H. who immigrated from Britain to colonial Virginia. One of William’s children, Kemp, married in Virginia, had seven children, was widowed, married again in Tennessee, and had six children. Several of Kemp’s eight sons and numerous grandsons served their country with distinction.
One of Kemp’s sons by his first wife was Frederick, the father of a Confederate soldier, Felix, and ancestor to Gasper Holland. Frederick was too old to serve in the Civil War, dying at age 74 in 1870 in Mississippi. Felix was a Prisoner of War. When the standard bearer in his Mississippi unit was killed, he bore the standard from a roof top. His brother, Frederick Croner Holland, Jr., was with him as a POW. Their other brother Hugh served with them but was not captured.
Another son of Kemp was Spearman Holland, who served in the Tennessee legislature from 1831-1833. He later moved to Mississippi, where he owned Holland Hotel, then followed Sam Houston to Texas with his family and 43 slaves where he established a plantation in the Piney Woods.
Spearman attended the Annexation Convention of 1845. He was a State Representative in the First, Seventh and Ninth legislatures and a Senator in the Tenth, serving on a committee to investigate paper money. He is mentioned in The Raven, a biography about Sam Houston, but all that is said of him is that he rescued a woman from falling through the planks of the floor which had not been nailed down at the capital at Washington-on-the Brazos. During the Civil War, he was with the Texas State Troops.
Spearman once bought a slave child to give to a slave woman because she had no husband or children. Spearman was so well liked by his slaves that they named their children and grandchildren after him, and over one hundred years after his death, their descendants did an unheard-of thing. They put up a plaque honoring the slavemaster of their ancestors.
“It’s weird,” one of the descendants told the Longview News-Journal.
“Slavemasters are supposed to be mean and cruel, but he wasn’t that way.”
After the Civil War, Spearman gave his plantation consisting of thousands of acres to the nine families of former slaves, kept in trust by the overseer until all of them had some land. They renamed it Holland Quarters.
Spearman named Carthage after his hometown in Mississippi, and gave Panola County its name as well. Panola means “cotton” in an Indian language.
Spearman’s son, James Kemp Holland, raised a company for the Mexican War in 1846, and, although commissioned by the governor, was considered too young to command it. His uncle Bird was selected.
Later, James K. was elected second lieutenant of his company in the Texas Mounted Volunteers, serving with his uncle Bird, then was aide-de-camp to Colonel George T. Woods, who later became governor of Texas. He rose on horseback with little sleep, protecting supply and sick trains, and took over the leadership in the house-to-house fighting in Saltillo when his uncle Bird was injured.
When his uncle, Kemp Holland, died in camp with the First Mississippi Rifles, James K. left to take his body home, so missing the surrender at Mexico City. James Kemp Holland was in the Third and Seventh Sessions of the Texas House, and the Fifth Session of the Senate. He was a United States Marshal.
James K. declined nomination to the Secession Convention, but served as a colonel on Governor Pendleton Murrah’s staff during the Civil War. He was a delegate to the National Union Convention at Philadelphia in 1866. The greatest personal honor bestowed on Colonel James Kemp Holland was his election as Vice President of the State Association of Texas-Mexican Veterans by his fellow veterans at its National Convention, also in Philadelphia.
From the second wife of Kemp was Bird, who fathered four of Spearman’s slaves. Three of them were sent to Albany Enterprise Academy in Ohio. For some reason, the fourth, Marshall, the ancestor of Eva Chadwick, was not given his freedom until Emancipation. Marshall’s son, also named Marshall, owned a syrup mill and a grist mill at Holland Quarters.
Bird Holland was Texas Secretary of State. He served in the Fifth House Session. As chairman of the Committee on Education, he made the first report ever given to the state legislature on the University of Texas. He was also a United States marshal.
Bird was an aide-de-camp to General Zachary Taylor in the Mexican War, as well as a colonel on the governor’s staff during the Civil War. He was killed in action in Louisiana, fighting for the South.
Another son by Kemp’s second wife, John, was a minister.
Bird’s three freed sons served with the Union in Ohio. James disappeared from history after the war. When the Civil War started, Milton dropped his schoolbooks and tried to enlist, but was too young. He worked with the Quartermaster Department until he was allowed to join the Army. He fought in North Carolina, emancipating slaves, and was the first Medal of Honor winner from Texas.
Sergeant Major Milton Holland earned the Medal of Honor at the Battle of Chaffin’s Farm near Richmond, Virginia, with the 5th U.S. Colored Troops after all the white officers in his unit had died.
Highly praised by Generals Grant and Butler, Milton was recommended for commission as a captain, but the War Department refused because of his race. Milton settled in Washington, D.C., where he founded an insurance company, and was an executive in the auditing department of the U.S. Post Office.
After serving in the 16th U.S. Colored Troops and attending Oberlin College, their brother William had a post office appointment in Austin, taught in segregated schools, and was appointed and reappointed by several governors as superintendent of the Deaf, Dumb and Blind Asylum for Colored Youth in Austin which he helped found and where his wife Eliza later taught.
He used his first cousin, former State Senator James Kemp Holland, as a reference when he received the first appointment as superintendent. When William returned to Austin after an absence of several years teaching in another county, the Texas House of Representatives passed a resolution welcoming him back to town.
William H. Holland entered politics when he “took issue with Democrats who made a bid for black votes by inviting them to a nonpolitical barbecue meeting. [He] charged them with capitalizing on the political ignorance of blacks,” according to Pitre’s recent book, Through Many Dangers, Toils and Snares. A Republican majority wrote a new state constitution that allowed local segregated or integrated schools because the Democratic party of the time would not promote integrated schools. As a delegate to the Texas Republican Convention, William presented the resolution for segregated schools.
In 1873, he attended the Colored Men’s Convention in Brenham. William almost ran for mayor of Austin in 1880. He was a delegate to the Republican National Conventions of 1876 and 1880. William was elected without an opponent to the Texas House of Representatives during Reconstruction, where he introduced legislation establishing Prairie View A&M University.
William H. received more praise from his contemporaries than any other Holland of the time. Personnel of the Texas State Government with Sketches of Distinguished Texans refers to him as “thoroughly educated,” “intelligent”, and “vigorous of mind and body”. It said that making him school superintendent paid “him a higher compliment than any verbal eulogy could do.” Fifteen Legislature--Sketches of Legislators and State Officers calls William “a man of fine sense and good manners, and is a clear and forcible speaker.” A eulogist said, “Every time I came in contact with him I saw some new and noble quality that I had not before observed.”
The patriarch, Kemp Holland, a coroner in Tennessee, did not live to know of his sons’ and grandsons’ exploits in either state. It is unknown whether his second wife, Jenny, did.
On the day they were to meet Mrs. Chadwick, the Hollands stopped at the Texas State Library and Archives Commission, and at the State Capitol Library, to obtain additional information from researchers. After seeing the records of these relatives, one of the librarians turned to twenty-one-year-old Abraham Holland and said, “Young man, you have a lot to live up to.”
In fact, eleven Hollands have served in the Texas legislature. The four mentioned here-Spearman, Bird, James Kemp, and William H. Holland-are definitely relatives, but it is unknown whether the others are related. Photographs are available only of William because there was a Capitol fire which destroyed earlier records. So far, a search in Tennessee has not revealed a likeness of Spearman Holland.
There are several drawings or photos of William H. He appears in The African Texans, published for the Institute of Texan Cultures, but neither his nor Milton’s stories are now on the walls of that museum. He is however, depicted in the picture gallery on the walls of the State Capitol as a member of the Fifteenth Legislature.
A photo exists of a fifth legislator, Samuel Eli Holland, who first arrived in the Texas Republic from Georgia. He looks just like Gasper’s late Uncle Jerald of Arkansas.
The other Holland legislators were another William, a W. Holland, Arthur, Nehemiah, Robert H. and, in the 1960s, Lamoine. Some of them represented areas near where the kinfolks of Gasper and Eva lived.
In Austin, Eva Chadwick met Gasper, Sandra and Abraham Holland. She had just returned from a family reunion in Amarillo. While they were talking about all the coincidences, a man attending the same conference stopped, stared at Mrs. Chadwick from both sides, then announced, “You look just like a teacher at my old high school in Amarillo.” She asked him to call home to get her name. “She is probably a cousin.” Then she looked at the Hollands with a stunned deja vu expression on her face.
Information was shared in Austin and there were promises to attend each other’s family reunions. There will be reunions of Arkansas Hollands and Texas Hollands who didn’t know each other existed, nor that they had proven ancestry that went so far back. That some were famous as soldiers, legislators, and in the professions, was extra.
There is no known kinship between Gasper Holland of Pleasanton and any other family in Atascosa County named Holland or Hollan.