Two members of the Lynch family say they are “satisfied” with a plan put forward by Danville Mayor Rickey Williams Jr. where the Lynch name will remain atop the southeast entrance road to the city.
Monica Bolton and Dorothy Engelman spoke with the mayor during a meeting Thursday. Bolton says she presented the mayor with a history of the family’s roots in Vermilion County, which date to the 1830’s. She said Williams told her he is doing his own research and will present city council members with information on the family’s history. The name of the road could become “Lynch Family Road,” “Lynch Family Parkway” or stay the same, depending on what the council wants to do.
She says the mayor told her he wished he would have known the history behind the road’s name beforehand.
“You know, the motivation–he said it was just people asking. He said, in hindsight, he should have done his homework before he ever brought it up, which would have been good because then it wouldn’t have been brought up at all.”
Engelman said she is “completely fine” with what the mayor had to say. Bolton, who says she has spoken with more Lynch family members in the past month than ever before in her life, says she believes Williams understands the Lynch family’s history.
“He now understands that it was an honorable family that added a lot to the community, and did a lot of things: started hot lunches and PTA–and there’s just an innumerable amount of things they did out there. So he recognizes that and is not planning on taking the word ‘Lynch’ out of the roadway name.”
Lynch Road is the first entrance road off of Interstate 74 out of Indiana into Danville, where many of the city’s hotels and factories are located. A small cemetery and the fire department in the area also bear the Lynch name.
Williams said during a June city council meeting that he would be studying the roadway’s name, since the word “lynch” refers to the hangings of Black people in the South. The remarks came after the George Floyd killing in Minneapolis on Memorial Day.
