So I have heard the surname "Holland" a lot in in the USA. You would think this would mean it indicates that they are from the Netherlands. But I never hear this last name in the Netherlands. So i was wondering what this surname means in the USA and where it comes from.
Reaney and Wilson, 3rd ed., A Dictionary of English Surnames,p. 235, col. 2, says
Holland, Hollands: Begmundus de Holande c975 LibEl (Ess); William de Holaund 1246 AssLa. From Holland (Essex, Lancs, Lincs).
So they derive it from any of three towns in England. (The odd abbrevs. after the dates are the sources, indexed in the front.)
Of course, that only pushes the problem back: where did the place names come from? I don't have a geographical source book, but I can find out from a friend on request.
I do want to warn in general that speculation about names is unreliable. For example, I was expecting it to be a descriptive byname in origin, "someone from the Low Countries", but that's apparently wrong. I might have expected the towns to have been named from the Low Countries, maybe because they had a lot of settlers?, but note that one was in Lancashire, which is almost as far from the Low Countries as you can get and still be in England. Reaney and Wilson often note place-name derivations ("dweller at the ford by the steep bank", "so-and-so's farm"), so for all I can say now, the origin might be a case of "don't know; it just was?".
As for not seeing it in Holland: the purpose of surnames was to distinguish this William from that William in the same place by some distinguishing property, like father's name, place-name, occupational byname, descriptive byname, or whatever. For a community in Holland, what would be the point of adding "of Holland"? In a village in Holland, for example, almost everyone would be from Holland.
The counter-argument to that last is that England is attested in England by Reaney and Wilson (p. 156, col. 1), which puzzled even them: they discard a possible derivation from ing-lang 'meadowland' and say "The reference must be to the name of the country, a surname which appears curiously out-of-place in England, v. ENGLISH". (More sanely, English is derived just below from the tribe of Angles as opposed to Saxon, native English as opposed to French-origin, or to English in predominantly non-English areas like Wales, the Danelaw when it was Norseish, southern Scotland, ...)