Holt Cemetery
Stinnett, Hutchinson County, Texas
Marker Inscription
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)
Erected by Texas Historical Commission
The Story
Texas colonization and homestead laws of the late 1890s drew settlers into the thinly peopled Panhandle, and Hutchinson County gathered enough land applications to organize in 1901. In 1903 Benjamin and Birda May Holt donated seven acres for a community schoolhouse and cemetery; Nola Storrs was the first person buried there in 1909. The graveyard, later expanded when the school closed, still holds many of the area's first families and veterans of the World Wars and Korea.
Why it matters
The site marks the last great wave of American homesteading, when law and land grants transformed the empty Panhandle into settled communities within a single generation.
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Related people
- · Benjamin Holt
- · Birda May Kirk Holt
- · Nola Storrs
Themes & tags
Nearby & related markers
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After Hutchinson County was organized in 1901, settlers formed small country school districts across the plains, and this two-room schoolhouse rose in 1916 from lumber hauled all the way from Texoma, Oklahoma. Its modest classical-revival touches—a gabled entrance, oversized windows, decorative shingles—dressed up a simple frame building where classes met until 1935. Long after the last lessons, it stayed the community's gathering place for weddings, funerals, quilting bees, and elections.
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