William Curry Holden - University of Texas and McMurry College

University of Texas and McMurry College

After his military service, Holden obtained a job as principal at his alma mater, Rotan High School. Soon thereafter, he left to position and entered the University of Texas, where he studied under the historian Eugene C. Barker. He was also heavily influenced by Professor Walter Prescott Webb, author of The Great Plains. During most of the 1920s, Holden taught history at the college level while still continuing his own studies at the University of Texas, where he eventually earned his bachelor's, master's, and Ph.D. degrees. He later studied briefly at the University of Chicago and the University of Colorado.

In 1923, Holden organized and chaired the history department at the newly established McMurry College (now McMurry University), a Methodist-affiliated institution in Abilene, Texas. He encouraged his students to collect and preserve family and regional histories, including newspapers. He would utilize these materials in writing his doctoral dissertation, published in 1930 under the name Alkali Trails. He also launched a course at McMurry in archeology and took students to research sites along the Canadian River. He, along with Rupert N. Richardson, president of Hardin-Simmons University in Abilene, was among the original co-founders of the West Texas Historical Association, originally based in Abilene but relocated to Lubbock in 1998.