Lynchburg's Irish roots, and a St. Patrick's day proposal

You’ll notice that I don’t have an “O” or a “Mc” in front of my name. Truth be told, I’m only one-quarter Irish, on my mother’s side.
I do like Celtic music and Guinness stout, but I couldn’t tell you what county in the Auld Sod my ancestors came from, and I couldn’t sing the words to “When Irish Eyes Are Smiling” if I had a shillelagh aimed at my head.
Sometimes, when the occasion demands, I can do a credible “Danny Boy.”
But all this is irrelevant, simply a lead-in to my bi-annual rant (I always take alternate years off), loosely titled: “Why in the name of all that’s green doesn’t Lynchburg have a St. Patrick’s Day Parade?”
For those of you who may have moved to town since my previous rant, the Lynchburg area was first settled by an Irish immigrant, Charles Lynch.
It was his son, John, who laid out the plot for the city, and two other sons who started the Lynch family ferry business. But had Charles not come to America as an indentured servant, married the daughter of the plantation owner for whom he toiled, and become the recipient of land on the banks of the James River, Lynchburg might have sprang up somewhere else. Or not at all.
The legend is that as the boat carrying young Charles to the New World was leaving Ireland, he had second thoughts, leaped into Galway Bay and began swimming back to shore. Perhaps someone had just told him what “indentured servant” really meant.
Nevertheless, the story goes, Charles was unceremoniously collared and pulled back onto the boat, and the rest is history. Our history.
One has to wonder, though. Did Charles propose to the plantation owner’s daughter while he was still indentured? Given the social-climbing instincts of early Virginia’s large landowners, not to mention the prickly relations between English and Irish, I think it’s safe to say this was not the match that the plantation owner was dreaming of for his daughter.
Maybe that’s why the land he bestowed upon the couple was about as far away from the plantation owner’s land in Louisa County as was possible in those days.
So Lynchburg has Irish roots, but that’s not all. Here are some other reasons for us, and the local culture, to be indebted to the sons and daughters of Eire:
1. It was largely Irish laborers who built the James River & Kanawha Canal, giving Lynchburg a leg up on becoming a population center.
2. Because these laborers felt the need to go to church on Sunday in Lynchburg, they founded Holy Cross Catholic Church.
3. A number of Lynchburg’s early mayors were Irish.
4. Had it not been for Scotch-Irish moonshiners, many of whom did business in the counties around Lynchburg, we would never have had NASCAR. The sport sprang from the souped-up stock vehicles that the descendants of these early entrepreneurs used to evade and outrun the “revenuers.”
5. Bluegrass music has definite Scotch-Irish connections.
Tomorrow, then, we should be tapping our feet to some Bill Monroe riffs and sipping some green moonshine (OK, forget the second part of that). And we should be parading.
Roanoke has a St. Patrick’s Day parade, and its Irish connections — whatever they are — post-date ours by at least a century.
We can do this. Start at the City Market, where corned beef and cabbage and Guinness could be served, wind down Main Street to Ninth, then along the riverfront (paying homage to the remains of the canal en route) and back up Twelfth street again. Charles Lynch would be proud (John Lynch, being a devout and sober Quaker, would probably be mortified).
It’s probably too late, once again, to pull this off in 2008. But let’s start planning for next March right now (or as soon as the green beer wears off).
I see where the Rotary Club is having a St. Patrick’s celebration, and that’s wonderful. But without a full-blown Irish march, have we really done the holiday justice?
Not in Lynchburg.
No St. Patrick’s Day parade? What would Mickey Rooney say?