Wall detail, Holley Graded School. Photo by Margaret M. Cook, September 2012.
About This Project
Holley School Histories is an oral history project undertaken to document the stories of alumni and neighbors of the Holley Graded School, an historically black school, now a historic site, established in 1868-69 to serve the freed people of Lottsburg, Virginia.
Project Director Mary Lamb Shelden, on the faculty at Virginia Commonwealth University, came to know about Holley School through her research on author Louisa May Alcott. Louisa and her mother, Abba Alcott, were ardent supporters of Holley School for many years. When visiting the Alcott Family Papers at the Houghton Manuscript Library at Harvard University in summer of 2001, she found there a cache of letters from Sallie Holley and Caroline Putnam to Louisa and Abba Alcott. These letters had never been published, and no one had studied or written about them previous to Shelden's work with them.
On Shelden's first trip to Lottsburg in fall of 2007, she learned that the school had had a long life after the death of Holley, Putnam, and the Alcotts, as Putnam deeded the land in her will to a black board of trustees, which still exists and works to preserve the school and its history to this day. Descendants of the emancipated slaves who first established the school, the trustees and alumni whose histories are presented here represent the diverse gifts and talents nurtured by the school through the generations. Shelden determined to record these interviews to ensure that a more complete history could be told concerning this remarkable chapter in American education.
Many who have participated in this project thus far have posed the question: if the walls of Holley School could talk, what would they say? It is Shelden's earnest hope that the histories presented here go some way toward answering that question.
To learn more about the Holley Graded School historic site today, see the Holley Graded School website.
Project Director Mary Lamb Shelden, on the faculty at Virginia Commonwealth University, came to know about Holley School through her research on author Louisa May Alcott. Louisa and her mother, Abba Alcott, were ardent supporters of Holley School for many years. When visiting the Alcott Family Papers at the Houghton Manuscript Library at Harvard University in summer of 2001, she found there a cache of letters from Sallie Holley and Caroline Putnam to Louisa and Abba Alcott. These letters had never been published, and no one had studied or written about them previous to Shelden's work with them.
On Shelden's first trip to Lottsburg in fall of 2007, she learned that the school had had a long life after the death of Holley, Putnam, and the Alcotts, as Putnam deeded the land in her will to a black board of trustees, which still exists and works to preserve the school and its history to this day. Descendants of the emancipated slaves who first established the school, the trustees and alumni whose histories are presented here represent the diverse gifts and talents nurtured by the school through the generations. Shelden determined to record these interviews to ensure that a more complete history could be told concerning this remarkable chapter in American education.
Many who have participated in this project thus far have posed the question: if the walls of Holley School could talk, what would they say? It is Shelden's earnest hope that the histories presented here go some way toward answering that question.
To learn more about the Holley Graded School historic site today, see the Holley Graded School website.
Copyright Mary Lamb Shelden, 1 January 2013