Col. John Holder at Lower Howard's Creek

In 1782 he planted Holder's Station about a mile downstream from Boonesborough on the north bank of the Kentucky River, near the mouth of Lower Howard's Creek in what became Clark County. The stockade grew into a store, tavern, ferry, warehouse, mill, and boatyard—a Kentucky River flatboat hub for New Orleans-bound produce and one of the Bluegrass's earliest industrial corridors.

He married Fanny Callaway (one of the girls captured with Jemima Boone in 1776), sat as a Clark County justice under Governor Isaac Shelby, and is remembered on Kentucky Historical Marker 1048 and the John Holder Trail at Lower Howard's Creek Nature & Heritage Preserve.