[10] She taught, looked after administrative tasks, pioneered innovative means of gaining financial support, and earned southern white acceptance without yielding on racial issues.

Holley taught alongside Putnam after 1870 but was never reconciled to the isolation of rural Virginia, so she spent months at a time traveling in the North.

She held classes year-round in order to accommodate the labor demands on black children of different ages; she did not impose strict punctuality on a community without clocks; she and her assistants integrated a wide variety of print sources, objects, and the surrounding fields into the classroom.

She was a strident activist in the struggle to assure the freedmen access to the ballot box in the 1870s, and she served as their advocate and adviser throughout the rise of the Jim Crow laws.

She devised the curriculum, made innovations in pedagogy and policy, raised funds from northern friends, and taught in the school year-around.

[9][11] The Holley Graded School was notable for emphasizing a political curriculum and stressed the historical struggle for African-Americans and criticized industrial education unmercifully.

[3] Putnam retired in 1903, after thirty-five years of schoolwork, but she remained in Lottsburg, superintending the school and assisting in the community until her death in 1917.