HOLLAND, FRANCIS (?-1834). Francis Holland, one of Stephen F. Austin's Old Three Hundred colonists, traveled down the Coushatta Trace from Louisiana into Texas in 1822 with his own family, his brother William Hollandqv and his family, and his sister Mrs. Mary (Holland) Peterson and her two sons. They settled on Ten Mile Creek (later Holland Creek) in what is now Grimes County on property bought from Andrew Millican. Holland received title to his Grimes County league on August 10, 1824. The census of March 1826 listed him as a farmer and stock raiser aged between forty and fifty. His household included two servants, his wife (a sister of Mrs. William Holland), three sons, and two daughters. Francis Holland was defeated by John P. Coles in the alcalde election in 1826 but was comisario in 1830 and represented Montgomery County (later Grimes County) in the Convention of 1833. Holland died in 1834. He is mistakenly listed on a monument at the Grimes County Courthouse as a soldier in the revolutionary army, but the mistake arises from the fact that two of his sons, Francis and Tapley, were killed in engagements in 1836.
BIBLIOGRAPHY: Eugene C. Barker, ed., The Austin Papers (3 vols., Washington: GPO, 1924-28). E. L. Blair, Early History of Grimes County (Austin, 1930). Lester G. Bugbee, "The Old Three Hundred: A List of Settlers in Austin's First Colony," Quarterly of the Texas State Historical Association 1 (October 1897). Worth Stickley Ray, Austin Colony Pioneers (Austin: Jenkins, 1949; 2d ed., Austin: Pemberton, 1970). Harold Schoen, comp., Monuments Erected by the State of Texas to Commemorate the Centenary of Texas Independence (Austin: Commission of Control for Texas Centennial Celebrations, 1938). Texas House of Representatives, Biographical Directory of the Texan Conventions and Congresses, 1832-1845 (Austin: Book Exchange, 1941).
