CHAT HOLLEY: the man and the myth behind the road and botched land deal

When Chat Holley was a young man growing up in Walton County in the early 1900s, he certainly did not expect a road to be named after him. Nor did he expect that often-misspelled road to run straight through a local government controversy.

Before his name became a thoroughfare at the center of a Sunshine lawsuit, Chat Holley was just an old salt who minded his own business.

“He probably wouldn’t care” about all of the disputes around the land bearing his name, according to his son, Jerome William “Buddy” Holley. “But he might cuss them out. He wouldn’t be totally happy with what’s going on today.

“He was a well-liked and thought-of man,” said Buddy. “But you didn’t want to cross him.”

William Alford “Chat” Holley, the oldest of nine children born to Randall and Belle Holley, grew up along the banks of Choctawhatchee Bay. A lifelong native of Walton County, Chat left only one time, in 1917, to work in a factory in Georgia. But he returned shortly after.

“I didn’t like it. I missed the open country. You couldn’t go out and holler. Up there you holler and they’ll lock you up, think you’re drunk or crazy,” Chat was quoted as saying in a July 4, 1984, article in the News-Herald Horizons of Panama City.

On July 2, 1924, a 23-year-old Chat married his child bride, 15-year-old Laura Elizabeth “Madie,” and bought her a piece of land. The property was 20 acres at the head of what is now Chat Holley Road, across from the bay.

According to another 1980s article, Chat approached Mr. Cawthon in DeFuniak about the 20 acres. “He wanted $200 for the land, but when I finally convinced him that all I would give was $100, he let me have it,” says the article written by Carol McCrite.

In the later years of their marriage, Madie would joke, “It’s nothing to celebrate being married to you for 50 years,” although she did turn down a brand-new piano, offered by her parents to stave off any potential suitors, in order to marry Chat.

The place became the site where the couple raised their three children: Katherine, Mattie Bell and Buddy. They enjoyed their quiet life by the bay.

“It was a wonderful way to grow up. There was nothing here then,” said Buddy. “We lived on a dead end, and when a car would approach, Daddy used to say, ‘Someone’s either coming to visit or they’re lost.’ ”

Chat was just a regular man, but in the early 1980s, when roads were being named for the purpose of establishing the 911 emergency system, neighbor Janice Foots suggested that Power Line Road be renamed Chat Holley Road.

“She told her dad, ‘Mr. Chat has been here forever. It would be nice to name it after him,’ ” said Buddy, whose family had lived there for about 50 years at the time.

So Janice and her father took the suggestion to the County Commission, and the rest is history.

Chat Holley lived off the land, where everything he needed to survive was available in abundance, and tended to his own business.

“He was from the old school,” said Buddy of his father. “He didn’t believe in messing with you, and you better not mess with him.”

Chat’s passion was for hunting, and he would rise before the sun every morning to go after deer, gators and even wild hogs. He was a regular hunter up until the last years preceding his death in 1984.

“My mama would fix his lunch in a gallon syrup can for him to take to work,” said Buddy. “But then a friend would stop by and say, ‘Let’s go hunting.’ So he would grab his gun and head off to the woods, forgetting about work.”

Chat’s work was varied, ranging from commercial fishing to driving a school bus for Walton County.

“My daddy had no aspirations of being rich, but we never missed a meal,” said Buddy. “He was a good provider. We were poor, but we didn’t realize it until we were grown.

“Everything he needed to survive was here: There were fish in the sea and game in the field. He even knew how to make his own whiskey,” said Buddy.

“For medical purposes,” interjected Maybelle, Buddy’s wife of more than 50 years, who grew up locally in Red Bay.

In his later years, Chat’s favorite pastime was to sit at the base of an old oak tree under a sign reading “OFFICE,” swatting flies and monitoring traffic as it would go by.

“He would count the cars on Friday as people headed south,” said Buddy. “Then he would count the cars on Sunday, just to make sure they all went home.”

Buddy summed up his dad as “an old frontiersman.” A newspaper from the time called him “a true South Walton pioneer.”

But although this longtime Walton County resident earned his name on the road, it isn’t likely he would be happy about the problems now surrounding it.

Flash forward 20 years from the naming and people are losing their jobs over the land where Chat and his family would listen to the bellows of barges passing.

Not only is his name now connected to a land deal gone bad, but also the road is notoriously misspelled. Signs on the 3-mile stretch read Chat Holly Road and Chat Holley Road. Even Google maps have it spelled both ways, which, though small consolation, is not as bad as a newspaper article headlining an article with a butchered “Chad” Holley.

“My daddy would probably say, ‘If you’re going to use my name, at least spell it right.’ ”