HOPKINSVILLE, Ky. (WTVF) — In addition to telling our local history, we want to highlight the people who documented that history for us to tell. On this final day of Black History Month, we’re sharing one of those stories.
There’s this tradition that’s been going on for a while at Hopkinsville Brewing Company. As evening arrives, there are certain nights where people grab a drink and settle in for a little Hopkinsville history.
“Thank you for coming out for History on Tap tonight!” said Alissa Keller, executive director of the Museums of Historic Hopkinsville-Christian County.
She spoke to a crowd of people, huddled together listening.
“We’re going to go back on a little journey a hundred years, and I’m going to do my very best to do this justice,” Alissa continued.
The subject of the night was only possible because of the efforts of a man named J.T. Lynch.
“J.T. was my dad,” said Wendell Lynch, former Hopkinsville mayor. “[My father] grew up in the era of segregation, but he was a survivor. He would often tell us about the way things used to be.”
By the late 1980s, J.T. was getting older. He’d seen Hopkinsville change so much, but he wanted to remind people of a downtown he remembered from the 1920s. It was a downtown full of thriving Black-owned businesses.
“He wanted to document it, somehow someway,” Alissa said.
“None of us know how long he was working on this or know how long it took him to put it together,” Wendell added.
From memory, J.T. created a map of Hopkinsville’s Black business district of 1925.
“Like a lot of communities with a large Black population, it was very self-sufficient,” Wendell said.
Between J.T.’s work and Alissa’s additional research, there’s a more complete story of where, a hundred years ago, this city had Black doctors, dentists, attorneys, a Black-owned newspaper called The New Age, and a Black woman named Nannie W. Carter who was what we’d call a podiatrist today. With their workplaces often alongside Jewish merchants then, the Black businesses had everything.
“A Chauffeur’s Club was the name of it,” Alissa told the room. “It was a taxi cab stand, had a number of cab drivers working out of there.”
J.T. Lynch died several years after drawing the map. You have to wonder what he’d think about his work getting people out for an event like History on Tap.
“We have Mr. Lynch to thank for bringing us all together, giving us a starting point to look back a hundred years on what it looked like for people who didn’t look like most of us,” Alissa said, looking out over the crowd. “Oh! All of us!”
“He would have been very humbled,” Wendell said about his father. “His legacy was not to make something around himself. It was really to preserve something for posterity. This was his contribution to our community.”
Do you have a positive, good news story? You can email me at forrest.sanders@newschannel5.com.
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