THE LYNAHS

 

James Lynah (1735-1809) was a Dublin-born doctor who entered the British medical service as a naval surgeon.* 

 

After being shipwrecked in the West Indies in the early 1760s, James Lynah spent some time working in Kingston, Jamaica, where he made friends with members of the Freemasons, who recommended that he settle in Charleston, which he did about 1765.** His wife Eleanor (or Ellinor, nee Parker) and two sons, Edward (then aged about twelve) and James (then aged about seven) joined him about 1768.

 

James Lynah set up what would become an extensive country practice in St. Stephens, a small community in Berkeley County, north-west of the city of Charleston. His residence was near the original home of Gabriel and Esther Marion at Brick House (or Goatfield) Plantation at Cordesville, but the Marion family had by then moved to Georgetown to secure a good education for their son Francis, who would become the famous patriot guerilla fighter known as the ‘Swamp Fox’. 

 

Marion’s influence on Edward is given as a factor in the decision by the Lynahs, father and son, to join the revolutionary cause, with Edward serving as a surgeon’s mate alongside his father in Maybank’s Berkeley Regiment and in Daniel Horry’s Regiment of Light Dragoons, to which James Lynah was appointed Chief Surgeon in September 1779.

 

It was in this capacity that he treated Count Casimir Pulaski for a grapeshot wound at the Battle of Savannah in October 1779. His account of the incident, as related directly to his grandson, tells of Dr. Lynah’s extraction of the grapeshot, and of the decision by Pulaski to seek succor with the French fleet (and their surgeons) also at Savannah, rather than risk falling into the hands of the British. Dr. Lynah felt that had he stayed with the American forces, and been carried on a litter under his continuing care, he would have survived; but gangrene set in as the French ship tried to make land at Charleston, and its progress was such that the Count had to be buried at sea (there is a suggestion that he may have been buried on land, on the banks of a creek possibly on St. Helena Island or on Samuel Bowen’s Greenwich Plantation in Savannah’s Thunderbolt district). A symbolic funeral was held in Charleston to mark his passing. Three French and three American officers bore his pall, and were followed by Pulaski’s horse.

 

When James Lynah returned to the Charleston area after his service in the revolutionary war, he purchased a property at the corner of Meeting and Queen Streets (No. 55 Meeting Street, later destroyed in the Great Fire of 1861), and lived there until his death. He continued to practice medicine, and also served in important public positions in the new federated state of South Carolina, being at one time Director General of Military Hospitals, and, at the time of his death, Surgeon General of South Carolina.

 

His younger son James returned Europe before he was twenty (possibly as a result of an early involvement in revolutionary activity in America), and made a career for himself first in Holland and then in the Isle of Man, where he remained until his death at Ramsey in 1816. 

 

The elder son Edward (1759-1834), who at age thirty-two had married eighteen-year-old Elizabeth Sanders Rose, continued to practice as a doctor but became more involved in developing the property interests begun by his father, who had famously on one occasion 'purchased 500 acres on August 10 1779 for 10,000 pounds and sold it on August 28 1779, only eighteen days later, for 14,000 pounds' according to a family account. During this time he acquired Laurel Springs Plantation on the Combahee River, between Charleston and Beaufort.

 

In the 1782 'Confiscation and Exile' controversy that named British loyalists, Dr. Lynah's name was included – despite his service to the Revolution – as someone who had been in receipt of a British military commission. He refused to accept the taint of 'guilt by association' and was eventually pardoned in 1784 and allowed to continue in residence and in possession of his properties.

 

In the succeeding years, Dr. Lynah was a model of civic and professional involvement, serving as Justice of the Peace; warden of Ward 8 on the first incorporated municipal board; officer of the Fellowship Society, the Mount Zion Society and his Masonic Lodge (in all of which involvements he served at various times as presiding officer); founding officer of the South Carolina Medical Society; and director of the Bank of South Carolina. 

 

Dr. James Lynah died on October 17 1809 at the age of seventy-four, having spent (according to his obituary) forty-six years in the city.*** His wife Eleanor, who was somewhat older than her husband, died at the end of 1813 at the age of eighty, and was described as being ‘a most ardent Catholic’ who was buried at the ‘mother church’ of her religion in the Carolinas, St. Mary’s in Hassell Street.

 

By the 1820s, with his brother James dead, Edward Lynah (who had been the sole trustee of his father’s estate) had grown the Lynah property portfolio so that it included extensive property in Charleston and the surrounding area. An estimate of his holdings in 1825 lists three downtown properties, including the former family home at Meeting and Queen, Edward's own home at Pitt and Montague Streets (where he lived with his second wife Adeline Fickling, his first wife having died in 1816), and Nos. 4 and 5 King Street.

 

Outside the downtown area, the Lynah possessions included the Laurel Springs Plantation now extending to over 2000 acres; a similar acreage in land tracts in St. Paul's Parish in Colleton County; 1300 acres in St. Bartholemew's Parish adjacent; and 4000 acres in Florida. The family owned over two hundred slaves.

 

Edward continued his parents' association with the Catholic Church in the city, being involved in the purchase of the land at Vauxhall Gardens that eventually became the site of the Cathedral of St. Finbar and other church institutions. 

 

Unfortunately, 1825 represented the height of the Lynah family fortunes, for at about this time Edward's son James, the eldest of his five surviving children, was forced to intervene in the face of his father's growing debts. The disposal of the properties and the difficulties it created in family relationships (including with the descendants of his alienated late brother James) dominated his declining years. Edward died in 1834 at the age of seventy-four.

 

The Lynah family continued to feature in the civic and professional life of Charleston for several generations. Edward's oldest son James (1793-1877) eventually settled in Philadelphia, where he died at Chesnut Hill and was buried in Baltimore. Edward's youngest son, Edward Thomas (1805-1862) is believed to have been educated at Dublin before embarking on a medical career at Warrenton, Georgia. Other branches of the family were prominent in Savannah, Georgia and Auburn, New York.

 

 

* His family background is not known, and there are several theories as to the origin of his name, which is often transcribed from manuscripts as ‘Lynch’. The most popular suggestion is that the name is a corruption of the Gaelic ‘Laigheanach’, or ‘Leinsterman’ (i.e. from the province of Leinster), but others opine that the name may be of Welsh origin (‘Lynor’) or that it was taken by a husband or son of the O’Neill clan who had married a Lynor and acquired property rights by adopting her name. 

 

** Other more colorful accounts put the senior James forward as being exiled because of his connections with Irish revolutionary interests, and his son Edward as being born at sea less than a day’s sailing from Charleston. There is an interesting interment in St. Philip's Episcopal Cemetery in Charleston of a John Lynah who died in October 1767, and may be a sibling who died young and was buried there in the absence of a Catholic burial ground. It may also have been a member of a previous generation, perhaps an uncle or, less likely, James's father.

 

***This would give the year of his arrival in Charleston as 1763 rather than the 1765-6 usually quoted.