Shadrach and Lucinda Holdaway

Shadrach Holdaway was born on October 15, 1822, in Hawkins County, Tennessee, the son of Timothy and Mary Trent Holdaway. His parents moved often, through Indiana, Illinois, Missouri and Arkansas, before settling among the Latter-day Saints at Nauvoo, Illinois. A family history account says he was baptized in November 1843, the first of his family to join The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. When the Saints were driven out of Nauvoo in 1846, the Holdaways went west with them.

At Council Bluffs on July 16, 1846, Shadrach enlisted as a private in Company C of the Mormon Battalion, the volunteer unit raised for the war with Mexico. He was 23. He marched with the battalion to California and served his year, and after his discharge he stayed on for a time to work the placer diggings. He reached Salt Lake City on October 21, 1848, and two months later, on December 24, he married Lucinda Haws.

Lucinda had been born on October 20, 1828, in Wayne County, Illinois, a daughter of Gilbert and Hannah Haws. Her family had wintered at Mount Pisgah in Iowa and moved to Winter Quarters in the spring of 1848 to start west with the first companies. In reminiscences she left decades later, she remembered washing clothes in cold water, burning buffalo chips because there was no wood, and herds of buffalo coming down to drink within a quarter mile of the wagons. At night the wagons were drawn into a corral, and the travelers sang and prayed inside it. Her company reached the Salt Lake Valley on September 23, 1848.

Carding wool on the Provo

The newlyweds did not stay put. In 1849 Shadrach set out with Lorenzo Young and others to buy machinery for carding and spinning wool, a trip his obituary placed at St. Louis. Lucinda's own account says the couple bought the woolen mill machinery in Kanesville, Iowa. Either way, they came back across the plains in the James Pace company in 1850 and reached Provo, where Lucinda's family lived, on the last day of that year. A Provo historical marker says the unassembled carding mill was paid for with California gold dust.

Early in 1851 Shadrach built a cabin north of the Provo River at the foot of the bench and set up a carding mill, a shingle mill and a machine shop, with the river turning the wheels. Lucinda dictated the moment plainly decades later: "my husband built a machine shop and set up the first carding machinery." Bishop David Evans helped install it, and it began working in October 1851.

During the Walker War of 1853, Brigham Young ordered people living outside the settlements to move in, and Holdaway moved his works about a mile south to the northwest corner of what is now Center Street and 500 West, where a large ditch supplied power. The Provo marker credits him with opening the Provo Woolen Factory there in the spring of 1854; local women wove some 3,500 yards of cloth from its carded wool. He and James Simkins also ran the Provo Machine Shop on the site. His obituary credited him with building the first threshing machine in Utah, from wagon tires and other iron left behind when the army abandoned Camp Floyd.

In 1852 Shadrach also married Lucinda's sister Eliza, whose married name was then Pickup. She died in 1855, days after giving birth to a son, Marion, on February 28. In all Shadrach fathered sixteen children, ten of whom lived past infancy. He sat on the manufactures committee of the Deseret Agricultural and Manufacturing Society, helped build the Provo Canyon road, dug canals, ran sawmills and raised cattle. In 1887, hauling lumber from his mill in Spanish Fork Canyon, he was thrown from his wagon and dragged under a wheel; his jaw was badly broken and one ear nearly torn off. The carding mill had closed about 1870.

A farm at the lake bottom

By the 1870s the Holdaways were also farming the lake bottom northwest of Provo. A family history says Shadrach settled land near Vineyard in 1873, laid out an irrigation canal and planted an orchard. In August 1877 the Deseret News reported that Lucinda had spent a week at "their farm at the lake bottom" cooking for the hired hands. Riding home on a hay wagon, she was thrown off when a wheel struck a deep rut, and the wheel rolled over her, breaking her arm below the elbow and injuring her ankle.

Shadrach did manual labor almost to the end. In December 1902 he came into Provo from his ranch in Vineyard, took a chill that turned into pneumonia, and died on December 24, his and Lucinda's 54th wedding anniversary. A day or two before he fell ill he had been explaining to a Herald reporter his plan for Utah Lake. The Herald called him "a man of tireless industry and wonderful physical endurance." He was buried in the Provo City Cemetery.

Lucinda outlived him by fourteen years. Her obituary said she had for many years practiced medicine and done valuable service in the community. In 1907 she dictated her life story to Etna H. Foulger; the manuscript is now held at Brigham Young University. She died on April 7, 1917, at 88, survived by 47 grandchildren and 108 great grandchildren.

Holdaways of Vineyard

The family stayed on the lake bottom. In 1898 Marion Holdaway, Eliza's son, moved his wife Prudence and their children to the old Holdaway homestead in Vineyard. He farmed there until his death in June 1929, and his funeral was held in the Vineyard ward chapel. Prudence lived on the homestead until she died in December 1942, at 89. Lucinda's obituary listed a son named Andrew N. Holdaway, and a man of that name is credited in Vineyard's ward history with laying the first clay tile drains in its wet fields and, with George M. Smoot, setting up a milk cooling and skimming station on the Holdaway farm in 1890.

The name runs through Vineyard's later story. Walter and Milton Holdaway built a commercial onion business with their own warehouse. Walter R. Holdaway served on the building committee for the 1939 chapel, led the Vineyard dairy cooperative, was the ward's bishop in 1942 and by 1950 was president of the Orem Stake. Holdaway Road crosses the town. In 1993 Robert and Cumorah Holdaway were called from Vineyard to the England London Mission, and in 2002 a Vineyard teenager named Ben Holdaway told the New Era that his brother Ryan had served in Florida and his brother Jacob had been called to Uruguay.