DUANE
Duane's take
Here's how the official marker tells it, and I'll do my best to honor every word. Now, some stories start before a person even knows they're in one. Katy Holland was seven years old in 1822 when her family packed up and moved to Texas — not as latecomers, not as stragglers, but as part of Stephen F.
Austin's Old 300 Colony. Seven years old, and already part of something that history would spend the next two centuries trying to describe right. Her first husband, Mill McDowell, wasn't a stranger to that world either.
He was also a member of Austin's Colony — so this was a family already woven deep into the fabric of early Texas. And then there was Tapley Holland. A cousin.
Killed at the Alamo. You let that sit for a moment. The marker doesn't linger, but we can.
Katy didn't get the quiet life the stories sometimes promise at the end. She was widowed once. Then widowed again.
Twice over, before she married William Cobb sometime in the 1840s. She raised five children through all of it — through frontier Texas, through loss, through whatever the land and the years threw at her, and they threw plenty. The marker calls it harshness.
Frontier life in Texas. That word — harshness — is doing a lot of work in a very small space. But I think Katy Holland McDowell Treadwell Cobb would've recognized it as an honest word.
She lived the whole of it, and here in Grimes County, the marker makes sure we don't forget her name — all four of them.
What the marker says
In 1822, at the age of seven, Katy Holland migrated to Texas with her parents as a member of Stephen F. Austin's "Old 300" Colony. Her life reflects the harshness of frontier life in Texas. Twice widowed before her marriage to William Cobb in the 1840s, she was the mother of five children. Her first husband, Mill McDowell, was also a member of Austin's Colony, and a cousin, Tapley Holland, was killed at the Alamo.