Private Photograph Collections, George R. Lynam Jr. Collection, Photographs

This series, primarily created by George R. Lynam Jr., consists of photographs and two postcards documenting the Chesapeake and Delaware Canal, with a focus on the locks, bridges, construction activities, and usage of the canal, particularly in the St. Georges, Delaware area, leading up to the completion of the St. George’s Bridge. Additionally, the series includes a few images of Mt. Pleasant and the Howell White School.

George Raymond Lynam, Jr. was born on May 23, 1948, to George Raymond Lynam, Sr. and Anna Mary (Dennison) Lynam. Lynam comes from two generations of Dairy farmers and grew up on his father’s, George Lynam Sr.’s, dairy farm on Paper Mill Road in Newark. Lynam knew from a young age he wanted to be a farmer and left the state after high school to earn a master’s degree in agricultural economics at Virginia Tech. He then returned home to work as the grain operation’s manager at Baker Farms in Middletown for the next five decades. George was an avid reader, a Delaware history enthusiast, and an active St. Georges United Methodist Church member. He died at age 66 on October 23, 2014, in a freak farming-related mechanical accident. He is buried at Red Clay Creek Cemetery, next to his parents. He was married to Sherry Kitto, a retired horticulturist Professor in the Department of Plant and Soil Sciences at the University of Delaware, for eleven years before his death.