The Holt family belongs to the maternal line that eventually leads to the Pates, and its story begins in the sandhills of North Carolina before it took root in the cotton and cornfield country of West Tennessee. To follow the Holts is to trace a family drawn steadily westward across the nineteenth century—out of the Carolinas, into Gibson County, Tennessee, and, in the last generation gathered here, on toward Arkansas and Texas.
The Land That Held Them
Most of the family took root in Gibson County, in the northwestern quarter of Tennessee, across the middle decades of the nineteenth century. This was some of the last territory in the state to be opened to white settlement, ceded by the Chickasaw in the early 1800s and not organized as a county until 1823—only a few years before the earliest of these families appear in its records. When the Umsteads and Campbells were establishing themselves here in the 1820s and 1830s, the country was still a raw, recently cleared frontier, its forests being felled and its section lines freshly surveyed.
The soil was good, drained by the forks of the Obion and the Forked Deer rivers and well suited to row crops. Cotton was the great cash crop of West Tennessee, supplemented by corn and hogs and the subsistence crops that carried a household through the year. These were farming families in the fullest sense, and their strength was measured partly in the number of hands they could put to the work—which helps explain the large households the census recorded in every generation. Many of them clustered near the small communities of Humboldt and Medina, and it was in the county's fields and churches that most of them made their lives.
One thing set Gibson County apart from a purely agricultural backwater: the railroad. The town of Humboldt grew up as a junction on the Mobile and Ohio line, laid through the county in the 1850s, linking local farmers to distant markets and giving the county a commercial center of some bustle and consequence.
The Civil War fell hard on this ground. Gibson County lay close to the great battles fought along the Tennessee and Mississippi rivers, and the region was crossed and re-crossed by both armies. The very rail line that gave Humboldt its prosperity also made it a military target, and cavalry raids, guerrilla activity, and the strain of occupation marked the war years. Many of the family's marriages and deaths in this era fall squarely within the war's shadow, and at least one man of the family died in that wartime period.
David Holt
The family's earliest recorded figure is David Holt, whose death came violently in the last winter of the Civil War. David married first, on 17 December 1822 in Cumberland County, North Carolina, Nancy Rebecca McNeill, born about 1810 and dead by about 1845. Together they had at least ten children. After Nancy's death he married Nancy Elizabeth Shane on 16 April 1846 in Gibson County, Tennessee, and by that second marriage had at least four more children.
In January 1865, the family was visiting David's daughter, Susan Holt McCaslin, near Huntingdon in Carroll County, Tennessee. On the 26th, roving bushwhackers rode in demanding food, silver, and everything of value. They killed David Holt, who had tried to protect his womenfolk in the house, and left him lying by the gate. Riding out into a back field, they killed his son-in-law, John McCaslin, and John's brother, Riley McCaslin, a Union soldier. They returned to the house, pushed the women and children aside, and ate the food from the table. After ransacking the bedrooms, they dragged out two feather ticks, cut them open, and ran through the house and yard strewing feathers as they went. Taking Riley McCaslin's horse with them, they called back, "Come out and get your old man; he is dying out by the gate." Through all of it, David Holt's seven-year-old grandson, Haskell McCaslin, watched and saw every one of the men killed. All three were buried in a row, with sandstones for headstones, at Pleasant Hill Methodist Church Cemetery in Leach, Tennessee.
John William Marshall Holt
David's son John William Marshall Holt carried the family forward and gave it its deepest roots in Gibson County. He was born on 12 August 1827 in Fayetteville, in Cumberland County, North Carolina, a river town in the sandhills of the state's southeastern reaches, the son of David Holt and Nancy Rebecca McNeill. At some point in his youth or early manhood his family made the move west to the cotton lands of Tennessee, and by adulthood John had settled in Gibson County, the community that would remain his home for the rest of his life.
On 2 November 1848, at the age of twenty-one, John married Parthenia J. Umstead in Gibson County. Their union spanned the greater part of his adult life and produced a large family. In 1864, in the midst of the Civil War, he married a second time, to Sabina Vashtine Martin, in Gibson.
John's life was one of remarkable rootedness. The censuses of 1850, 1860, 1870, and 1880 all locate him in Gibson County, tracing a steady presence there across four decades. He almost certainly made his living from the land, tending crops and livestock and depending on the labor of his family. He died on 26 October 1882 in Gibson, at the age of fifty-five, and was buried in the community where he had spent nearly his entire adult life.
His first wife, Parthenia J. Umstead, lived out the whole of her short life within the same county. Born on 1 May 1829, she was the daughter of Ezekiel and Francis Umstead, and she came into a Gibson County still filling with farming families drawn to West Tennessee's fertile soil. She married John at nineteen, and over the years of their marriage bore at least six children: Nancy Elizabeth; James Richard; Ezekiel Hutson—whose name carried forward that of his maternal grandfather; John Marshall; Martha Frances; and Fanny. Her days were governed by the rhythms of the farm and the needs of a large household—cooking over an open hearth, tending a garden, preserving food, spinning, sewing, and caring for children who arrived in steady succession. She died on 4 September 1863 in Gibson County, only thirty-four years old, during the upheaval of the war. Her place of burial is not recorded.
Ezekiel Hutson Holt
Among all these children, it was Ezekiel Hutson Holt who carried the line toward the Pates. Born on 18 April 1855 in the Gibson community, he belonged to a generation whose childhood was interrupted by war—he was six when the conflict began and ten when it ended, old enough to carry lasting memories of the disruption and scarcity that touched nearly every family in West Tennessee. In 1860 he appears as a boy of five living in Hope Hill; by 1870 the family was enumerated at Humboldt.
On 18 December 1876, at the age of twenty-one, Ezekiel married Louranie Adkins Heath in Gibson County, joining two families of the same rural community. The couple welcomed two children, John Henry Holt and Hattie Elizabeth Holt, and by 1880 the young family was recorded together in Gibson County, with small children and the whole of adulthood seemingly ahead of them. That future was not to be. Ezekiel died on 24 September 1880 in Gibson County, at just twenty-five, and was buried that same year in Medina. The cause of his early death is not recorded, but in an age before modern medicine a young and otherwise healthy man could be carried off swiftly by fever, infection, or accident. He left Louranie a young widow with two small children.
The Heaths
Louranie brought her own family's history into the marriage—a Heath line that, like the Holts, moved out of the Carolinas and through Tennessee. The earliest of them was Richard Heath, born in 1766 in Craven, North Carolina, who established himself in Rutherford, Tennessee, where he died in 1814. His son James S. Heath, born about 1804, likely in North Carolina before the family's migration, married Delaney Pate on 8 August 1826. James maintained a residence in Rutherford before moving on to Yell County, Arkansas, settling in Magazine, where he died in 1869.
James's son Henry Thomas Heath was born about 1833 in Gibson County, and it was he who anchored the family in the same neighborhood as the Holts. The federal census found him in Gibson County decade after decade—in 1840 as a small child, in 1850 and 1860 as a young man, and again in 1870 and 1880 as a settled husband and father. On 12 July 1859 he married Eliza Jane Campbell in his native county, barely two years before the Civil War descended on Tennessee. Whatever those war years brought, the couple endured, and the household appears intact in 1870.
Eliza Jane Campbell was born in 1844 in Gibson County, the daughter of Robert C. Campbell and Sarah T. Lyon. She married at fifteen, an early age even by the standards of rural Tennessee, and settled with Henry in the county where both had grown up. Together they raised a large family: Louranie Adkins Heath, Richard Marion Heath, Fanny Heath, William Henry Heath, Eli Wilkes Heath, Norman Hudson Heath, and Eddie Heath. Eliza's days were shaped by the ceaseless labor of a farm wife—cooking, sewing, tending a garden and poultry, nursing the sick, and managing a home that grew steadily busier as the children came. She appears in the Gibson County census of 1880, still at home among her family in the county of her birth; beyond that point neither the date nor place of her death is recorded.
For most of his years, Henry Thomas Heath was a man of one place, which makes his final chapter all the more striking. Sometime after 1880 he left Tennessee and made his way to Polk County, in the mountainous western edge of Arkansas near the Oklahoma border, joining the thousands of Southern farm families who pulled up stakes for Arkansas in the closing decades of the century, drawn by cheaper, fresher land. He died there before 1900. His place of burial is not recorded.
Louranie Adkins Heath
Their daughter Louranie Adkins Heath was born in the small farming community of Medina, in Gibson County, on 3 August 1860, into a nation on the very brink of civil war. She grew up through the 1860s amid recovery and Reconstruction, appearing in her parents' household in 1870 as a girl of about ten and in 1880 as a young woman on the threshold of her own married life.
She married young. On 18 December 1876, at sixteen, she wed Ezekiel Hutson Holt, and from that marriage came John Henry Holt and Hattie Elizabeth Holt. Widowed within a few years, Louranie left Tennessee behind. On 18 October 1881, in Faulkner County, Arkansas, she married a second time, to Elisha Manson Hawkins, joining the great current of migration that drew Southern families out of the worn cotton lands of Tennessee toward the newer farmland of Arkansas. She settled with her new husband in Union City, in Faulkner County, where three more children were born: Fletcher Adkins Hawkins, Flora M. Hawkins, and Thomas Weltch Hawkins. The name Adkins, carried through her own name and passed to her son Fletcher, threads through the family across two generations.
Louranie appears in Union City in the census of 1900, established in the household she and Elisha had built over nearly two decades. Her life traced a long arc westward—born in Tennessee, married and widowed there, remarried and rooted in Arkansas, and finally carried still further into Texas. She died in Ladonia, in Fannin County, Texas, in October 1907, at forty-seven, in the blackland prairie cotton country that drew many families out of Arkansas in the early twentieth century. The circumstances of her final move and the cause of her death are not recorded, nor is her place of burial known.
Hattie Elizabeth Holt
The daughter of Ezekiel Hutson Holt and Louranie Adkins Heath, Hattie Elizabeth Holt, represented a departure from her family's Tennessee roots. She was born in Medina, Gibson County, in 1879, and grew up within the family circle before eventually moving away. On 2 January 1898 she married George R. Pate in Wooster, Arkansas—a union that would carry the maternal Holt line into the Pate family.
Hattie and George established their lives in the Southwest, living at Wooster and Union City in Arkansas before moving westward to Lake Arthur, Artesia, and Otis in New Mexico. Hattie became known for her large family and her life as a farm wife, and she remained a member of the Methodist Church throughout her life. In 1965, at eighty-five, she moved to Odessa, Texas, where she lived until her death in 1967 at eighty-seven.