HENRY C. HOLLOWAY. By the death of Henry C. Holloway, on April 28, 1905, Fort Worth and Northern Texas lost a citizen and business factor who had been prominent in this vicinity since before the war. The men of prominence and success who have spent fifty years in this part of the country are now, unfortunately, rapidly passing away, and it is with that melancholy regret which pertains to all mortal history that the chronicler speaks of one whose career has just closed in such honor and esteem. And yet the place which the late Mr. Holloway held in Fort Worth was such as to give his name and prosperous career an enduring prestige in the annals of this section of the state.
Born in the state of South Carolina, March 31, 1838, Mr. Holloway was past the age of sixty-seven when he died. He was a son of Wiley and Mary (Reems) Holloway. He lived in his native state until he was twenty years of age, being reared on a farm and educated in the schools there, and about 1858 he came to Texas and settled in the vicinity of Fort Worth. It was as an overseer of Negroes that he came here, being employed in that capacity by Captain Richard Ward. As has been told elsewhere in this work, Tarrant county, at the date of Mr. Holloway’s arrival, was sparsely settled, the county seat had only recently been established at Fort Worth, and it is therefore as one of the youthful pioneers of the country that he began to figure in its history. He has been with his employer some three years when the south was called upon to defend the issue of states’ rights and the Negro question, and young Holloway was one of the men who enlisted from Tarrant county and served till the close of the war as a member of the Texas artillery. The close of the war found him again in Tarrant county, ready to assume the burdens of civil life and assist in the rehabilitation of the country from the wreckage caused by Civil and Indian warfare. He engaged in the cattle business, and in the course of his early connection therewith spent some eleven months in the territory of New Mexico. Returning to this state he engaged in farming two years, then was a cattle drover to Arkansas for a like period. Mr. Holloway is also well remembered as having been engaged in the mercantile business in Fort Worth a number of years, but during the years preceding his death his business interests were in farming and stock-raising. A successful man, he was liberal in opinion and means, did much for his city and in the line of public-spirited endeavor, and his name is permanently identified with the history of Fort Worth.
Mrs. Holloway, the surviving widow, is without doubt the oldest living woman resident of Fort Worth, and for that and other reasons is one of the most interesting historical personages in the city. Margaret Loving was born in Moniteau county, Missouri, October 12, 1837, a daughter of Samuel and Elizabeth (Brown) Loving. In 1846 she accompanied her parents to Texas, and in the year 1849, known to history as the year in which the soldiers of General Worth established the military post on the bluffs of the Trinity river and gave origin to the future city of Fort Worth, she, then a girl of twelve years, came with her parents and began her long residence at this place. She married Mr. Holloway on August 26, 1860, and their one child is now Mrs. A. S. Dingee, of Fort Worth.
Source: B. B. Paddock, History and Biographical Record of North and West Texas (Chicago: Lewis Publishing Co., 1906), Vol. I, p. 374.