About the Author
Lynn Hopewell was born December 19, 1937 in Portsmouth, Virginia. He is the son of the late Harry Lynn Hopewell and Charlotte Ross Mathews. Fauquier County was the home of his great-grandmother, Susan Payne Jones, the daughter of Black Horse Cavalryman Strother Seth Jones and Lucy Virginia Stewart, of Mt. Airy, near Dudie. He resides in Warrenton, Virginia where he has been Senior Warden of St. James Episcopal Church, a member of the Town of Warrenton Architectural Review Board, a director of the Fauquier Historical Society, and Chairman of the Board of Trustees of Wakefield School. He is a member of the John Marshall Club and the Fauquier Club. He was chairman of Fauquier County’s Historic Resources Committee.
He was a Contributing Writer to Fauquier Magazine and writes a column of opinion—“A Fauquier Point of View”—for the Fauquier Citizen newspaper.
He has been active in state-wide public service. He was appointed by Governor John Dalton to the Virginia Board of Commerce and served as vice chairman. He was appointed by Governor George Allen to the Champion Schools Commission, and from 1996-1999, served as a member and Vice Chairman of the State Council of Higher Education for Virginia, the state government body that coordinates Virginia’s system of higher education. He is a member of the Board of Governors of the Virginia Institute for Public Policy.
He began his professional work as an engineer for the Central Intelligence Agency and traveled to over 45 countries. He later worked as an executive in the high-tech industry in Northern Virginia and for the last twenty years has been a financial and investment advisor in private practice. He is chairman of The Monitor Group, Inc. an investment advisory firm in Fairfax, Virginia.
He received his A. A. from the College of William and Mary in Norfolk in 1958, his B.S. in physics from Virginia Polytechnic Institute in 1961, and his M.B.A. from Harvard Business School in 1968. He first learned of the Black Horse Cavalry when studying the genealogy of his mother’s family and was given his great-great grandfather’s Confederate Veteran’s medal. Strother Jones moved from Fauquier to Portsmouth for a while after the war and his daughter Susan married a local boy. Strother is buried in Warrenton Cemetery.
Lynn has been working on the history of the Black Horse for over twenty- five years. He provided research for civil war artists Don Prechtel’s painting “Native Sons: the Black Horse Cavalry” and Mort Künstler’s painting “The Bravest of the Brave: Black Horse Cavalry in Warrenton, Virginia, February 22, 1863”.
He is married to the former Leslie Ann Lindsay of Arlington. They have a blended family of five children; Harry, Matt, Todd, Erin and Stewart.
He has spoken about the Black Horse Cavalry on many occasions in Fauquier and has written several articles on them for Fauquier Magazine. His research for his book on the Black Horse, The Bravest of the Brave: A History of the Black Horse Cavalry, continues.