that Lynchburg has nothing to do with the practice of lynching. You left out half the story that explains how the word came to be. Another confusion is that lynching did not begin as racial violence. Charles was known to be a zealot patriot and would lynch, severely beat, Tories, enslaved people and whites alike who he felt sided with Tories. There is no record, not to say it didn't happen, that anyone was executed by a beat down then known as lynching. He really couldn't execute anyone because his county was a hotbed of colonial loyalists.
Historic records show that Charles Lynch was even the first to use the verb to lynch and there was a challenge from his relative William Lynch, I think of Illinois, vying for but denied credit for coining the word because of his vigilante forays during the Revolutionary War.
Looking further back in Ireland where the family came from, there is legend that a 15th century ancestor was the first to take up the illegal practice, that some scholars say Charles probably heard. So there was no doubt of the all around association of to lynch with the Lynch family.
There are things not in question. No one indicted John Lynch and I made clear where the confusion lies. You changed the poster's suggestion of reconsidering the name of the town to whether Everyone should change their surname. What? I'll rather stay on point and not muddy the OP's news of bringing down Confederate monuments. But I felt the poster made a good point of changing the name of a town that is synonymous with cruel and unusual punishment. And had to address your claim that lynching, as it was practiced then, had nothing to do with Lynchburg, where it started, is false.
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