Wall detail, Holley Graded School. Photo by Margaret M. Cook, September 2012.
History of Holley School
One mid-November night in 1868, in a new schoolhouse building in a tiny town on Virginia’s Northern Neck, Glasgow Blackwell, one of the town's freed slaves, made a short speech to formally welcome the new schoolteacher his community had called to teach its children: "They told me they would break off my fingers close to my hand if they catched me with a book in it," Blackwell said," But now our children will have this good chance to learn to write . . . and they will have to come to our children to get their business done" (qtd. in Herbig, 243-44).
Blackwell's words were representative of the hopes of blacks all over the South who, in the aftermath of the American Civil War, celebrated their emancipation. Even so, after centuries of slavery, departing the homes and plantations of their former masters, they very often found themselves without means of subsistence. As Emma Diggs Carter, a granddaughter of slaves, observes, “We were cast out with nothing. No shelter, no food, no means of an education – we didn’t have anything.” Still, having been denied an education by law under slavery, the freed people of the South knew that they must find a way to educate themselves and their children. Education was, they knew, the key to both present survival and future success.
In his masterpiece, The Souls of Black Folk (1903), W.E.B. Dubois argues that the earliest period of reconstruction, while certainly uneven in its progress, had done “three things worth doing”: relieved a great deal of physical suffering, moved former fugitives back toward the farmlands and, “best of all,” inaugurated the exodus southward of Yankee “Schoolma’ams”:
Blackwell's words were representative of the hopes of blacks all over the South who, in the aftermath of the American Civil War, celebrated their emancipation. Even so, after centuries of slavery, departing the homes and plantations of their former masters, they very often found themselves without means of subsistence. As Emma Diggs Carter, a granddaughter of slaves, observes, “We were cast out with nothing. No shelter, no food, no means of an education – we didn’t have anything.” Still, having been denied an education by law under slavery, the freed people of the South knew that they must find a way to educate themselves and their children. Education was, they knew, the key to both present survival and future success.
In his masterpiece, The Souls of Black Folk (1903), W.E.B. Dubois argues that the earliest period of reconstruction, while certainly uneven in its progress, had done “three things worth doing”: relieved a great deal of physical suffering, moved former fugitives back toward the farmlands and, “best of all,” inaugurated the exodus southward of Yankee “Schoolma’ams”:
The annals of this ninth crusade have yet to be written–the tale of a mission that seemed to our age far more quixotic than the quest of St. Louis seemed to his. Behind the mists of ruin and rapine waved the calico dresses of women who dared, and after the hoarse mouthings of the field guns rang the rhythm of the alphabet. (18)
In seeking out this history that still largely has "yet to be written," one can hardly find a likelier candidate than the story of Holley School.
The new teacher introduced by Glasgow Blackwell that night in 1868 was white abolitionist Caroline Putnam - and in an account to her longtime companion, Sallie Holley, in a letter published in the National Anti-Slavery Standard, she described Blackwell's words as "hushed, as all their speaking and action is, as if they must do everything holding their breath, [from] the long habit of fear" (qtd. 244). Yet the new school was by that meeting launched; said Putnam to Holley, "It was a wonderful, wonderful meeting to have in a life-time! I wish you of all the world had been here" (qtd. 244). Holley and Putnam had met at Oberlin College during their time there in the 1840s and, after Holley’s graduation, they had taken up the cause of abolition in the public forum, joining the speakers’ circuit in the 1850s and publishing correspondence from the field in the abolitionist press. In this work, Holley and Putnam had associated with the very vanguard of the movement: Frederick Douglass, Abby Kelly Foster, Samuel Joseph May, and William Lloyd Garrison. After the war was over, Holley and Putnam had cast about for what to do next to advance the cause of racial equality. Moving to Lottsburg, Virginia to teach the freed people there was, for Putnam, that next undertaking – and just a short time later, Holley joined Putnam to assist in the implementation and protection of the school, ultimately purchasing a piece of property on which the community could establish a more permanent presence.
The school ultimately had a long life as an independent, co-educational, private institution, with an integrated faculty and a sometimes-integrated student body (on the model of Oberlin). Though the walking distance and weather and the demands of rural life sometimes made for irregular attendance, most often, the children studied their primer lessons during the day, and the elders studied at night (Carter; Herbig, 292-95). When Holley died in 1893, she passed the school property on to Putnam. When Putnam, after teaching several generations of students and mentoring their teachers, at last died at the age of 90 in 1917, she deeded the land in her will to a black board of trustees to sustain the school in its mission of black education. After Putnam’s death, Holley Graded School came to be nominally operated by the Lottsburg school district, one of a handful of public black schools on the Northern Neck (Herbig 382). For the Holley Graded School site, however, the black board of trustees retained the deed to the land. In the 1920s the black community, seeing that the student body had outgrown that first space, raised money and provided the labor to begin building, in stages, the four-room schoolhouse that now stands, beginning in 1922. According to Holley School Alumni Edward and Eleanor Holden, an inter-racial W.P.A. work crew came through Lottsburg in 1933, tore down the old school, and completed work on the building that now stands. On the cornerstone are inscribed both the original date of Holley's purchase of the school site, 1869, and the year that the current building was completed, 1933, marking the importance of the legacy of the first Holley School to the one that came after.
Holley Graded School remained a black public school until 1959 when, in response to the Brown v. Board of Education decision, a new black school, Lottsburg Elementary, was established, as the state attempted to justify its rationale of "separate but equal" facilities. Even after Holley School closed as an elementary school, it continued as a center of community life and spent some years as a center for adult learning programs, expanding its educational legacy. Today it has a continuing role as a community center, and one restored classroom is reserved as a museum space, so that the community and the larger public can continue to learn about the school's legacy of black education.
_______________
Carter, Emma Diggs. Personal interview conducted by Mary Lamb Shelden, 21 August 2010. See transcript: http://holleyschoolhistories.weebly.com/oral-histories.html.
Herbig, Katherine Lydigsen. Friends for Freedom: The Lives and Careers of Sallie Holley and Caroline Putnam. Diss. Claremont Graduate School, 1977. Ann Arbor: UMI, 1977. 77-22,476.
Holden, Edward and Eleanor. Personal interview conducted by Porter Kier, November 1988.
W.E.B. DuBois. The Souls of Black Folk. 1903. New York: Bantam, 1989.
The new teacher introduced by Glasgow Blackwell that night in 1868 was white abolitionist Caroline Putnam - and in an account to her longtime companion, Sallie Holley, in a letter published in the National Anti-Slavery Standard, she described Blackwell's words as "hushed, as all their speaking and action is, as if they must do everything holding their breath, [from] the long habit of fear" (qtd. 244). Yet the new school was by that meeting launched; said Putnam to Holley, "It was a wonderful, wonderful meeting to have in a life-time! I wish you of all the world had been here" (qtd. 244). Holley and Putnam had met at Oberlin College during their time there in the 1840s and, after Holley’s graduation, they had taken up the cause of abolition in the public forum, joining the speakers’ circuit in the 1850s and publishing correspondence from the field in the abolitionist press. In this work, Holley and Putnam had associated with the very vanguard of the movement: Frederick Douglass, Abby Kelly Foster, Samuel Joseph May, and William Lloyd Garrison. After the war was over, Holley and Putnam had cast about for what to do next to advance the cause of racial equality. Moving to Lottsburg, Virginia to teach the freed people there was, for Putnam, that next undertaking – and just a short time later, Holley joined Putnam to assist in the implementation and protection of the school, ultimately purchasing a piece of property on which the community could establish a more permanent presence.
The school ultimately had a long life as an independent, co-educational, private institution, with an integrated faculty and a sometimes-integrated student body (on the model of Oberlin). Though the walking distance and weather and the demands of rural life sometimes made for irregular attendance, most often, the children studied their primer lessons during the day, and the elders studied at night (Carter; Herbig, 292-95). When Holley died in 1893, she passed the school property on to Putnam. When Putnam, after teaching several generations of students and mentoring their teachers, at last died at the age of 90 in 1917, she deeded the land in her will to a black board of trustees to sustain the school in its mission of black education. After Putnam’s death, Holley Graded School came to be nominally operated by the Lottsburg school district, one of a handful of public black schools on the Northern Neck (Herbig 382). For the Holley Graded School site, however, the black board of trustees retained the deed to the land. In the 1920s the black community, seeing that the student body had outgrown that first space, raised money and provided the labor to begin building, in stages, the four-room schoolhouse that now stands, beginning in 1922. According to Holley School Alumni Edward and Eleanor Holden, an inter-racial W.P.A. work crew came through Lottsburg in 1933, tore down the old school, and completed work on the building that now stands. On the cornerstone are inscribed both the original date of Holley's purchase of the school site, 1869, and the year that the current building was completed, 1933, marking the importance of the legacy of the first Holley School to the one that came after.
Holley Graded School remained a black public school until 1959 when, in response to the Brown v. Board of Education decision, a new black school, Lottsburg Elementary, was established, as the state attempted to justify its rationale of "separate but equal" facilities. Even after Holley School closed as an elementary school, it continued as a center of community life and spent some years as a center for adult learning programs, expanding its educational legacy. Today it has a continuing role as a community center, and one restored classroom is reserved as a museum space, so that the community and the larger public can continue to learn about the school's legacy of black education.
_______________
Carter, Emma Diggs. Personal interview conducted by Mary Lamb Shelden, 21 August 2010. See transcript: http://holleyschoolhistories.weebly.com/oral-histories.html.
Herbig, Katherine Lydigsen. Friends for Freedom: The Lives and Careers of Sallie Holley and Caroline Putnam. Diss. Claremont Graduate School, 1977. Ann Arbor: UMI, 1977. 77-22,476.
Holden, Edward and Eleanor. Personal interview conducted by Porter Kier, November 1988.
W.E.B. DuBois. The Souls of Black Folk. 1903. New York: Bantam, 1989.
Copyright Mary Lamb Shelden, 1 January 2013