Indiana legislator, Baptist clergyman, judge, was born near Danville, Ky., being one of fourteen children. His father, Henry Holeman (the son preferred the simpler form of the name), migrated in 1776 from Virginia to Kentucky, where in 1789 he met death at the hands of hostile Indians who attacked a blockhouse in which his wife, Jane, and children had taken refuge. After completing a preparatory course, the son read law in the office of Henry Clay. In 1805 or 1806 he set up as a lawyer in Carrollton, Ky., then known as Port William. While living at this place, he was married to Elizabeth Masterson, the accomplished daughter of Judge Richard Masterson, a man of some wealth and consequence. William Steele Holman was their son. [WSH also appears in the Dictionary of American Biography.] In 1810, the young lawyer crossed the Ohio and settled in Indiana Territory a short distance south of Aurora, of which town he was one of the founders. The following year Gov. William Henry Harrison appointed him prosecuting attorney for Dearborn County. In 1814, he was elected to the popular branch of the territorial legislature, by which body he was chosen speaker. Before the end of 1814, he was appointed judge of one of the two circuits comprised in the territory and two years later to the supreme bench of the new state. He held this office until 1830, when Gov. James Ray Brown refused to reappoint him. In 1831, he was an unsuccessful candidate for the United States Senate. In 1834, President Andrew Jackson appointed him to a federal judgeship. From this time until his death in 1842, he served as judge of the United States district court of Indiana.In the interval between 1830 and 1834, when he held no judicial appointment, Holman was made superintendent of schools of Dearborn County. Throughout his life he was interested in education. He was one of the founders of Indiana College (Indiana University), and was a devoted friend of Franklin College. He was ordained to the Baptist ministry in 1834, was an active member of the Baptist Board of Foreign Missions and a moving spirit in the work of the Baptist Association throughout Indiana for a number of years. He is said to have written a number of poems and, in his youth, to have attempted a novel which some time after publication he tried to suppress, believing that "its morals were not sound."
C. W. Taylor, Biographical Sketches and Review of the Bench and Bar of Indiana. (1895) W. T. Stott, Indiana Baptist History. (1908) Journal of the Senate of the State of Indiana, 1831. Damaris Knobe, The Ancestry of Grafton Johnson. (1924) A Biographical History of Eminent and Self-Made Men of the State of Indiana. (1880) History of Dearborn and Ohio Counties (1885) Indiana Journal, 6 April 1842.
Circular Letter of 1813
by Judge Holman
Circular Letter of 1818
by Judge Holman
Two Letters from Henry Clay to Judge Holman