Willis Holt

• formal_name:
• first_date: 1818
• last_date: 1821
• function: Printer
• locales: Norfolk
• precis: Journeyman printer in Norfolk in 1821.
• notes: Printer
  Norfolk
  Journeyman printer in Norfolk in 1821.
  Holt is known to be a part of the Virginia printing trade only as a result of his death in 1821 during a yellow fever outbreak in Norfolk; a brief obituary appeared only the daily American Beacon, suggesting that Holt had worked in that press office; it also reported that he had recently abandoned the trade to take up a grocery business there shortly before his death.
  The many Holts in that Southside neighborhood then, most of who descended from one seventeenth-century progenitor, suggest that he was born and raised there, although no evidence supporting such a suggestion has yet been found. The only other public notice of Holt is his appearance in a list published in the American Beacon in 1818 of militia members who were fined for non-attendance to musters of the 54th Virginia Regiment that year; that mention, tied with Holt's absence from War of 1812 service rosters, hints that he had joined this local regiment after the war, so making his birth date sometime in the late 1790s. But without further definitive evidence, Holt remains a fleeting presence in the trade.
  
  
  Personal Data
  
  Died:
  Oct. 4
  1821
  Norfolk, Virginia
  
  No other information yet discovered,
  
  Sources: Notices in Norfolk American Beacon, Dec. 4, 1818 & Oct. 5, 1821.
  
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This version of the Index of Virginia Printing was a gift from the estate of the site's creator, David Rawson. The content contained herein will not be updated, as it is part of the Library of Virginia's personal papers collection. For more information, please see David Rawson Index of Virginia Printing website. Accession 53067. Personal papers collection, The Library of Virginia, Richmond, Virginia.