Holt, Missouri

Holt is a small city straddling the Clay and Clinton County line in northwestern Missouri, named for one of the earliest settlers in the area. Jeremiah Abel Holt was born in Orange County, North Carolina, in eighteen eleven, donated the land for the townsite in eighteen thirty-seven, and remained one of the foundational figures of this part of Missouri. The town was platted in eighteen sixty-seven.

Many of Holt's early settlers came from Tennessee, Kentucky, and Virginia, following the pattern of southern migration that characterized much of antebellum Missouri. The town sits just north of the Kansas City metro today, a quiet agricultural community that has kept its small-town character despite the sprawl of the city nearby.