Fred L. Holmes, lawyer and author, was born on a farm in Winnebago County, Wisconsin, in 1883. In 1906 he received his degree of Bachelor of Arts from the University of Wisconsin and shortly thereafter founded the Holmes News Service which served the press in Wisconsin and elsewhere until 1927. Early in that year he was admitted to the bar, the profession he followed until his death in 1946. Beginning in 1909, at the suggestion of the late Robert M. La Follette, Mr. Holmes was either business manager or managing editor of the La Follette Weekly for most of the life of that periodical. Although interested in politics, his only venture in office-holding was in 1913 when he served as a Republican member of the lower house of the Wisconsin legislature.
During the last decade or more of his life, Mr. Holmes became interested in history and traveled quite extensively throughout the United States and portions of Canada, taking pictures and gathering material which he later incorporated into books. He was especially interested in his own state and wrote three books about it, also edited two volumes of Wisconsin in collaboration with Glenn Frank. The volumes he published as a result of his travels were: Abraham Lincoln Traveled This Way, George Washington Traveled This Way, Alluring Wisconsin, Badger Saints and Sinners, Old World Wisconsin, and The Voice of Trappist Silence. Having a newspaper man's “nose for news” he wrote his material many ways and sent short articles and excerpts from his books to various magazines and newspapers in the United States, several of which were accepted.
