John Daniel Holliday

https://www.familysearch.org/service/records/storage/das-mem/patron...

Written by Grace Pratt Thomas, wife of Norwood Jay Thomas, son of Norwood Washington and Chloe Agnes Hislop Thomas, and a great, great grandson of John Daniel Holladay, Sr. through his daughter Karen Happuch Holladay Bingham.

John Daniel Holladay, Sr. for whom an area in southeastern Salt Lake County was named, now having a population of 50,000 or more ( in 1987), was born 10 March 1798, in Kershaw District, South Carolina, the son of Daniel Holladay and Keziah Terry. He grew to manhood in this area, and was married on April 16, 1822, to Catherine Beasley Higgins (daughter of Benjamin Higgins and Katherine Pickens.) She was born November 14, 1797. John Daniel and Catherine Holladay lived first in Kershaw District, South Carolina, but within a short time moved to Mosco, Marion (later Lamar) County, Alabama. (There is a conflict here--the Holladay history gives the date of their move as 1826, yet family group charts from Genealogical Library show all of the children having been born in Alabama.)

John D. Holladay became a successful planter and owner of a large and thriving plantation in this place. A very interesting account of his plantation, life and conversion to the Mormon faith is given by Absolom Porter Dowdle, a L. D. S. missionary who baptized him and later married one of his daughters. This account will separately follow this sketch.

Upon the conversion and baptism of the Holladay family, John D. freed his slaves and began to plan to join the body of the Saints in Nauvoo. A number of Mormons living in Monroe County, Mississippi, and in Alabama, gathered under the direction of John Brown. They were advised not to travaI all the way north to Nauvoo and then west. Instead, they banded together under the name of the "Mississippi Company of Saints" and headed for Independence, Missouri. From this, the "Queen City of the Trails," they then struck westward along the Oregon Trail expecting to make contact with the main group of pioneers somewhere along the Platte River. They could not know that the main group would be severely weakened after the exodus from Nauvoo and further decimated by loss of 500 of their able-bodied men to the Mormon Battalion, and would not progress beyond the Missouri River in 1846.