By birth and marriage, I've ever been blessed to live in the bosom of close-knit and extended families.

In my own family they were the Whichards and Bridgers.  With Edie I found the Hamricks to be much the same.

However, for Edie growing up, it was with her mother's family  --  the Moores  --  that she personally felt the closest connection.

This branch of the family and its collateral lines of Hollands, Golds and Pleasants came down from Pennsylvania to Cleveland County around the same time as did the Hamricks and their collaterals.  

WILLIAM AND MARY (HARRISON) HOLLAND

This couple were of English origin settling first in Pennsylvania, and then in all likelihood following "The Great Wagon Road" moved to western North Carolina.

On what is now called "Patrick Street"  --  the northern road connecting Boiling Springs to Shelby  --  used to stand a simple clapboard covered vernacular farmhouse known to the family as "The Weaning House," or "The Honeymoon Cottage."

This log cabin structure was the original Holland home site and supposedly one of the first homes on this side of Boiling Springs.

William and Mary Harrison Holland supposedly built it on their arrival in the area.   They died in the 1780's and their son followed by their grandson  --  both named William Isaac Holland  --  were its next occupants. 

Unfortunately little is known about these earlier generations of Hollands in North Carolina, but the land they settled has come down through the family with the titles often changing names to the present day homes of Edie's sister, Mett, and her late cousin, D.W. Moore  --  both seven generations removed from William and Mary Harrison Holland.

Early collateral branches of the Hollands  --  the Golds, the Griffins, and the Pleasants  --  are still among the inhabitants of modern day Cleveland County.

WILLIAM ISAAC HOLLAND, THE ELDER AND THE YOUNGER

William Isaac Holland, the elder, was born in 1747 and married Margaret Hall. 

He served as a captain in Colonel Davies' North Carolina regiment of the Continental Army during the Revolutionary War.   They had five children.  He died in 1837.

His son, the second William Isaac Holland, was born in 1786 and died in 1874.  He was married to Permelia Gold and the oldest of their thirteen children was Gold Griffin Holland (born 1820) who to this day occupies a position of true eminence among his descendants.

GOLD GRIFFIN AND CYNTHIA (MOORE) HOLLAND

Gold Griffin Holland was a captain in the 28th North Carolina Infantry of the Army of the Confederacy during the War Between the States.

When serving under the command of General Ambrose at the Battle of Fredericksburg, he was struck in the knapsack by a musket ball.

Family legend has it that he first thought himself seriously wounded only to find that a "minnie ball" lodged in his breast pocket stopped by a piece of "hard-tack" bread.

Such stories are often told of soldiers and war but this incident is documented by Douglas Southhall Freeman, editor of The Richmond Dispatch, in his monumental, multi-volume classic, Lee's Lieutenants, giving some credibility to the old family tale.

Sometime in this era -- either just before or just after the Civil War  --  he represented Cleveland County in the state General Assembly in Raleigh.

There is a photograph taken of him at this time that is now in the possession of my children and was recently seen in a documentary on The History Channel, which mentioned his escapades at The Battle of Fredericksburg.

At the end of the war Gold Griffin Holland returned home from Appomattox Courthouse on foot and took over the family farm.

As an adjunct to farming, he opened a gristmill along the country thoroughfare now known as Gold Road.  Damming up a creek on his property, the resulting pond provided the headwaters for to operate the mill run and its traces.

Bill Moore, Edie's cousin by her maternal uncle, Otis Moore, once told me that as a boy he often played in this area when his family visited their grandfather's farm from their home in Laurinburg.  

By this time the Holland farm had passed to Gold Griffin's son-in-law, John Franklin Moore, Bill Moore's and Edie's grandfather.

Gold Griffin Holland's story goes that his neighbors were so destitute during those "Reconstruction Days" that he kept the mill operating almost constantly so that folks would have enough to eat.

Edie and her sister, Margaret, used to say that after one such spell during which Gold Griffin Holland worked at the gristmill day and night for several days he suffered a "breakdown" of some sort.

With epilepsy having been diagnosed among his grandchildren and great grandchildren, I have now wonder if this might have played a role in his demise.

Whatever the reason, his health was apparently never the same thereafter and went continually downhill until his death in 1894.

He is now buried beneath an imposing upright monument in the graveyard across the road from Gardner-Webb University and the former Baptist church building his son-in-law, T. Carl Hamrick, helped finance.

This old graveyard, located in the center of Boiling Springs, is the resting place for the early generations of Hamricks and Moores and many others of the original families in the community.

The burial site is now full and a new cemetery was established many years ago outside of town on Patrick Road towards Shelby. 

Among the nine children of Gold Griffin Holland and Cynthia Moore was a daughter, Cynthia Susan Holland. 

Cynthia Holland married John Franklin Moore  --  the carpenter who had come to Boiling Springs from the town of Rutherford to work on the new Elijah Bly Hamrick house across town on the other side of Boiling Springs.

This couple was to become Edie's maternal grandparents and they would apparently have as great a hand in rearing her as did her own parents.

Next chapter    Chapter 12, The Scotch-Irish Migration

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