Holding Institute

Holding Institute was a community center in Laredo, Texas that was affiliated with the United Methodist Church. It was founded in 1882 as a kindergarten and primary school. For nearly a century thereafter, Holding was a state-accredited boys’ and girls’ boarding school. Having been ravaged by a flood in 1954, the boarding school relocated to north Laredo but closed some three decades later as a result of funding difficulties. It re-opened as a community center downtown in 1987 and functioned for twenty-four years until its closing in 2011.

The roots of Holding date to 1880, when Mrs. Jacob Norwood began to instruct several Mexican girls at her residence in Laredo, the county seat of Webb County in south Texas. The next year, women of the Methodist Episcopal Church, South set aside funds to establish the kindergarten and primary school. The Reverend Elias Robertson donated ten acres on the bank of the Rio Grande south of the United States Army installation of Fort McIntosh, and in 1882, the first building opened. Known then as "Laredo Seminary", the institution operated under the direction of missionaries Annie Williams and Rebecca Toland.

In October 1883, Miss Nannie Emory Holding, a Methodist missionary from Covington, Kentucky, began a 30-year tenure as superintendent of the institution that later was named for her. Her sister, Delia Holding, also taught during the first few years in the primary school. In 1886, early in the years of Nannie Holding's leadership, the all-girls school became coeducational when ten boys were admitted. Nannie Holding oversaw the growth of the school campus to include seven buildings on 26 acres (11 ha) and she planted flowers, shrubs, and trees on the sand dunes adjacent to the Rio Grande to convert the land to a garden. She obtained a 50-year charter for the school in 1891.

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