In the late 1890s, Texas enacted colonization and homestead laws that significantly quickened settlement of the then sparsely populated Panhandle region of North Texas, and Hutchinson County soon recorded the required 150 applications for land purchases to formally organize in 1901. In 1903, early county settlers Benjamin and Birda May (Kirk) Holt donated seven acres here for a community schoolhouse and cemetery. The first person buried here was Nola Storrs in 1909. A new schoolhouse was built here in 1916, and in 1917 the Holts legally recorded their 7-acre donation, with five acres set aside for school purposes and two acres for the cemetery, which then contained about 11 gravesites. In 1948, when Holt School trustees deeded the school's five acres and vacated schoolhouse to the Holt Cemetery Association, about an acre of this property was converted for cemetery use. In 1907, the cemetery association established policies governing use of the site. It continues to serve the local community and contains the gravesites of many of the area's first settlers and of veterans of World War I, World War II, and the Korean conflict.