frances butler simpson was in his own day a well-known historian himself and in fact frances butler simpson had a magnum opus, a biography of pitchfork and tillman from his own hometown. simkins grew up in this -- a town in south carolina and at some point he sat down to write this kind of gossipy, thinly fictionalized account of his hometown called lynch would. this thing was never published and it is now preserved only in the archives at longwood university in virginia where simkins taught his whole life but it offered a really unique perspective on edgefield and the area in which strom thurmond was growing up in an area which will thurmond was the biggest influential figure in edgefield political life there in the early 1940s. let me read you a little bit of this and then i'm going to stop talking. for some time in the late 1940s or early 1950's frances butler simkin set down to write a fictionalized memoir about growing up in edgefield or lynch would as it appears in his text. it was never published and is preserved today only in his personal papers and longwood. the untitled manuscript