When my Grandfather was Young

by Glenn N. Holliman 

Some Revealing Facts on my Grandfather's Younger Years, Part 1

Not many people living today remember Ulyss S. Holliman, 1884-1965.  He was my paternal grandfather who died when I was 18.  Below are two photographs which I believe the first and last taken of him.  The first may have been snapped in 1899 or slightly earlier, a formal portrait taken in Fayette, Alabama.  

The second was taken by me in the front yard of our home in Gadsden, Alabama in 1964, not long before he passed away.  Here he is age 80, still thin as a rail.  He died of emphysema and rests beside Pearl Caine Holliman in Forest Hills Cemetery near the Birmingham airport.

 

In neither photograph is he smiling which reinforces my memory that I never saw him smile or laugh.

But he did have a youth; I found it in the Fayette Banner, Fayette County, Alabama between the years 1900 to 1918. And he must have smiled and laughed, because he sang!

Ulyss went to Texas at age 17!

1901

Ulyss stopped formal education in the sixth grade, and probably was tired of working on the farm of his parents.  Manervia, Texas is half way between Waco and Austin, and founded in 1891 when the railroad came through the area.  The town boomed when oil gushed from the ground in the 1920s but the wells played out.  Today the town with a population of 200 or more is composed of only a few buildings. 

No doubt at the time some Holliman cousins, the children of his Uncle Cornelius Holliman (1849-1924), lived there, not far from Rockdale where numerous of our distant relatives still live today. Cornelius married a woman from Texas and had moved there ca 1890. 

Grandfather returned to Alabama

Evidently, Texas did not pan out because the next time Ulyss appears in the local Fayette press, he is once again a farm hand preparing for spring planting with his brother, Eck Holliman (1882-1926).

March 1904

My Grandfather, the Singer!

A few months later the Banner records that Ulyss would sing at the Oak Grove Church near Sardis, Fayette County!  This is extraordinary as I never heard my grandfather sing or any mention within the family, that given his taciturn personality, of one ever suggesting such a talent.  Reading between the lines, this was not the first time young Ulyss had performed religious songs in public.  Nor the last as additional clippings reveal.

July 1904

The clipping below further describes Ulyss's talent as a singer and song leader.  The occasion was an all day signing at the Caine's Ridge Baptist Church south of Fayette.  His father, John Thomas Holliman (1844-1930), seems to have been proud of his youngest son that day, John's 61st birthday.

1905

My Grandfather, the Suiter

Notice if you will, the second paragraph of the clipping.  Ulyss had joined the Odd Fellows, one of the many 'secret societies' for men a century or so ago.  But there is a hint of another attraction near Caine's Ridge.  That would be an 18 year old girl, named Pearl Caine (It was her family who gave the land on which the church had been built).

The portrait below, provided by the late Rhodes B. Holliman, shows an attractive young lady with penetrating eyes and strength of character in her demeaner. 

We will leave it here for this article and pick up the story of my grandfather's younger days in the next blog. - GNH