Page:Confederate Military History - 1899 - Volume 4.djvu/587

Rh teenth battalion, were brave and gallant soldiers. His great-grandfather, James Holt, held the rank of ensign in the continental army, and his grandfather, Ethelred Holt, was a soldier in the war of 1812. In politics he is an unswerving Democrat and in religion a Methodist.

Thomas M. Holt, Confederate soldier, former governor of North Carolina, and captain of industry, to whom the famous mills on Haw river are a fit and abiding monument, was born July 5, 1831, in that part of Orange county now known as Alamance and died at Haw River in 1896. He was the son of Edwin M. Holt, who established the first cotton mill in central North Carolina, and was equally successful in the management of extensive agricultural interests. Thomas M. was educated at Caldwell institute, and the university of North Carolina, where he was a student in the class of Judge Settle, Senator Vance, Judge W. A. Moore, Prof. W. C. Kerr, Kemp P. Battle and others of later prominence. Leaving college in December, 1850, he studied business methods at Philadelphia, and then entered into the manufacture of cotton with his father. In December, 1860, they centered their enterprise at the Alamance cotton mills on Haw river, where now the factories controlled by the Holts operate about 23,000 spindles and 1,000 looms and employ 1,100 people. Early in 1861 he entered the military service of his State and the Confederacy, and was on duty during that year, but upon the reorganization in the spring of 1862, it was recognized that his services were indispensable in the department of manufacture and supply, quite as essential to the success of the struggle as carrying a gun in the field, and he was returned to the management of the cotton and flour mills on the Haw river. In 1862 he became the sole owner of the mills there, and he increased the spindles to 1,000 and ran them night and day, making yarns, during the continuance of the war. Promptly accepting the situation at the close of the struggle, and foreseeing that the South must win future greatness in the channel marked out by the genius of the age, he began making brick to enlarge his mill, ten days after the surrender of General Lee, and in November of the same year was the first man to go on the market from the South to buy machinery for the manufacture of cotton. Since then the hum