Family:Adolphus Barker and Lois Link (1)

In 1908 Lois Link left her home in Thomasville, Tennessee, to accept a teaching position at the Holland School in rural northwest Georgia. She only taught there one year, but Holland would become her home and the center of her family.

Her daughter, Mary, wrote an article for The Chattooga County Historical Society Quarterly (September 20, 1993) describing the Holland School:

One of the county's oldest schools was built in the Holland-Chattoogaville community just south of New Hope South Baptist Church in the early 1890s. The names of some of the teachers who worked in this first Holland school were: Miss Hugh Lee Knox, Miss Mary Hemphill, Miss Sarah Meroney, Miss Lula Worsham, Miss Daisy Davidson and Miss Maude Sewell.

On August 10, 1896, Mr. John Pinkney (Pink) Holland, father of Mary, Bertha, Housch and Foster Holland, gave the land for the second Holland school. It was a one room school located southeast of the third and last school built in Holland.

Mr. Pink Holland put an ad in a Methodist magazine for a teacher. Lois Link of Cheatham County, Tennessee, near Nashville answered his ad and was hired to teach in 1908. She was 21 years old. Mr. Pink Holland paid her salary for teaching that year. Miss Link later married Mr. A. M. Barker and taught in Holland following his death.

Adolphus Montgomery Barker (1872-1921) was the only son of John Thomas Barker and Linnia Blake. He was 36 when he and Lois Link first met. He owned a store in Lyerly, Georgia, while also managing the family farm on Kincaid Mountain near Holland.

Lois only taught in Holland one year, but that was enough to catch Dolph Barker's heart. For the next few years, she continued to teach in various schools around Georgia until they married in February 1913. Lois kept Dolph's letters from that period, giving the rest of us an opportunity to get to know him.

Kincaid Mountain

Holland School 1909

1. ↑ Barker Family Bible, in Barker, Adolphus M. Barker Family Bible
   4, 1913 - 1995.
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