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During the early spring of 1913 Holt returned to Illinois and was employed by William E. Sommerville of the Illinois Aero Construction Company at Coal City, Illinois. Another west-coast pilot, Earl Daugherty, was flying there that season and Holt acted as alternate pilot and mechanic. Sommervile was operating two planes and Holt flew a number of early mid-west exhibitions and helped to rebuild the wrecked Morane-Borel monoplane Sommerville had purchased from George Mestach following his air collision and crash at Cicero when Howard Gill was killed. In August Holt flew for the Silver Lake Aviation Company at Akron, Ohio as a resort attraction for a short time then went to Chattanooga, Tennessee, where he finished out the season, flying a Kirkham-powered Curtiss-type biplane. In December he was back in Los Angeles, California for the winter of 1913-1914.
During 1914 Holt returned to the mid-west flying exhibition dates, and during 1915 toured the northwest area.
In 1916 he went to the new Ashburn Field, Chicago, Illinois, and was there when the United States Signal Corps, Aviation Service, took over the field as a training base, at which time Holt signed up as a civilian flying instructor along with T. C. McCauley, Victor Vernon, T. D. Hill, E. A. Johnson, C. R. "Sinnie" Sinclair, E. M. Laird and others.
In January, 1917 the Signal Corps moved the school to Memphis, Tennessee for the winter months and Holt was transferred there with the group. In the spring of 1917 activities were returned to Chicago and Holt remained there until late summer when he was sent to Langley Field, Hampton, Virginia, with James Johnson and Roderick Wright.
Langley Field was predominately a flight test base and there Holt [[strikethrough]] later [[/strikethrough]] began flying an experimental plane built by the Lanzius Aeroplane Company of New York. It was an unusual tractor biplane with a special variable incidence feature and was first powered by a 4 cylinder, 100 h.p. Duesenburg [[strikethrough]] motor [[/strikethrough]] engine.
Following some tests a Liberty engine was installed and the plane sent to McCook Field, Dayton, Ohio for further military tests. There are on June 29th, 1918 Holt was instantly killed when this plane crashed in a corn field about four miles

Transcription Notes:
11/06/2020 - Reopened for editing, changed "when his plane..." (last line) to "when this plane..."