James D. Lynch Papers

James D, Lynch was born in 1836 in Mecklenburg County, Virginia and attended the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. Lynch moved to Columbus, MS, in 1860 where he taught Latin and Greek at the Franklin Academy until the start of the Civil War. During the war, Lynch served in Confederate Army in a cavalry unit, where he rose to the rank of Captain. After the war he settled in West Point, MS, and began his literary career. His most notable works are Kemper County Vindicated (1879), an early foray into the field of the history of Reconstruction which contains very little historical information and portrays the South as ravaged by greedy Yankees; the Bench and Bar of Mississippi (1881), which contains comical sketches; and The Bench and Bar of Texas (1885) which focus on praise of powerful men; and finally three poems: Redpath; or, The Ku-Klux tribunal; Robert E. Lee, or Heroes of the South and Columbia Saluting the Nation (1893) in honor of the World’s Fair. Lynch moved his family to Texas in 1884, and died in 1903 in Sulphur Springs, Texas.

James D. Lynch married Hettie M. Cochran in 1861, and they had seven children: Rufus, James D., Pauline, Virgil, Alice, Charles and Junious, also known as June.

Pauline Lynch Evans Creighton, daughter of James D. Lynch. Creighton was born in Mississippi in 1868, and married her first husband, H.L. Evans, in 1889. She married her second husband, John Orde Creighton, in 1901, in Texas. In Texas, Creighton became actively engaged in the women’s suffrage movement, and also in efforts to support public health, and in particular improve sanitation in the city of Austin.