Samuel Ely Holland, state representative, county commissioner, county treasurer, soldier, and farmer, son of John Rickman Holland and Elizabeth (Walker) Holland, was born in Georgia on December 6, 1826. Sources cite his birth in either of the neighboring counties of Meriwether County or Troup County in Georgia. Holland’s father moved to Texas in the mid-1840s and settled in Erath County while Holland’s mother remained in Georgia until her death in 1862. Holland followed his father to Texas in 1846 and initially moved to Austin before finally settling in Burnet County. In the spring of 1847 Holland enlisted under Samuel Highsmith in the United States Army for service in the Mexican War. He eventually became a part of Col. John Coffee Hays’s regiment and engaged in guerrilla warfare until his discharge in May 1848. From October 25, 1848, until December 8, 1848, Holland served as a private under Capt. Henry E. McCulloch in Bell’s Regiment of the Texas Mounted Volunteers.
After his discharge in 1848, Holland purchased 1,280 acres of land on Hamilton Creek in Burnet County. At night he worked at assembling a log cabin, which would become the first permanent home and farm in the area. Samuel Holland was the first permanent home builder in the county, put in the first cultivated farm, strung the first wire fence and built the first all stone house for his homestead. Samuel Holland and Peter Kerr reportedly brought the first white faced cattle into this section, which later became the famous Hereford strain In October 1852. Holland married Mary Scott, the daughter of the first Burnet County judge, and the couple had the honor of being the first marriage in the county. They had one child, George A. Holland. After Mary's death he later married Clara Ann Thomas on December 6, 1855, and the couple had ten children.
Holland was a politically active citizen of Burnet County before the Civil War. He served as the county treasurer from 1852 to 1854, and in 1856 he was elected as the county commissioner. After the outbreak of the war, he enlisted for a second time and served in the Confederate Army in Capt. James P. Magill’s (also spelled McGill) company of the Burnet Guards in the Twenty-seventh Brigade. He served as a frontier scout until the war ended.
After the war, Holland continued his public service and pursued several business ventures. He was a member of the Grange and was a Royal Arch Mason. By the late 1880s he was a member of the Farmers’ Alliance. At the 1887 State Farmers’ Alliance meeting in Waco, he was elected as a delegate of the Tenth Congressional District representing Burnet County to attend the National Alliance meeting in October 1887 in Shreveport, Louisiana. He was a member of the Texas Mining and Improvement Company that built a railroad from Burnet to Marble Falls. He owned the Grange House and a livery stable.
By the mid-1890s Holland had joined the Populist Party. He ran for office as a state legislator and was elected to the Twenty-fifth Legislature to represent Burnet and Lampasas counties. He served on three House committees: the Commerce and Manufactures Committee, the Military Affairs Committee, and the Revenue and Taxation Committee. Holland introduced House Bill No. 591 to the legislature, which proposed to return civil and criminal jurisdiction to the Lampasas County court. The governor signed the bill on May 7, 1897. After his tenure as a Populist legislator, Holland returned to life as a full-time farmer and rancher.
By 1909 Holland had joined the Old Setters Association of Burnet County and was quietly living his life on Holland Ranch. Although he was not a member of a church, he considered himself a religious man and studied the Bible. Holland died a few weeks before of his ninety-first birthday on November 19, 1917, and was buried alongside his second wife, Clara Thomas, in the family cemetery (Holland Cemetery) in Burnet, Texas.
