LYNN — Gilbert du Motier, Marquis de Lafayette last visited Lynn 200 years ago. On Friday, he was seen again at Goldfish Pond on Lafayette Park — one of the The American Friends of Lafayette’s hundreds of stops on its bicentennial celebration of his farewell tour to the United States.
The tour will also visit Marblehead, Beverly, and Ipswich this weekend, among other stops in Massachusetts. It is visiting municipalities on the exact dates Lafayette visited them.
Lafayette, who was 66 during the tour, was the last-surviving major general of the American Revolution, and in 1824 he returned to the United States to make a tour of 24 states.
Massachusetts Lafayette Society President Alan Hoffman said Lafayette was on a “very tight schedule,” and though the communities of Lynn and Chelsea offered him breakfast, he declined because he had promised to dine in Marblehead.
Executive Office of Veterans’ Services Deputy Secretary Andrea Gayle-Bennett, a Lynn resident, was the first to welcome back Lafayette, who is being portrayed by Ben Goldman.
She told Lafayette that he saw a potential for greatness in America that others did not.
“Your support not only helped us win the war, but also laid the foundation for a lasting friendship between our two nations,” she said.
Gayle-Bennett also questioned where the United States would be today without Lafayette’s help.
“We might be speaking with a British accent and drinking tea instead of going to Dunkin’ Donuts,” she said.
Mayor Jared Nicholson said Lafayette’s decision to join the 13 colonies in the Revolution must have led to huge questions in his mind about whether the effort would succeed.
“He obviously saw enough hope and enough of the values of this aspiring country to stand with us against an empire,” he said.
Nicholson said that during Lafayette’s farewell tour, it must have been fascinating to see those questions answered, particularly the question of whether a democracy could be organized across a vast space among a populace that had never attempted that form of government before.
“We have some of those answers, but we still have questions about what our future holds and what it’s going to take to hold us together and to solve some of those underlying issues that have been with us from the beginning,” Nicholson said.
He added it is exciting to think that Lynn has been part of answering these questions from the beginning.
Lafayette then took the mic to tell his story of how he resonated with the American quest for liberty.
He said he believes he was adopted as a son by George Washington.
“Well may I stand firm and proud when in their name and, indeed, in your name, I can be said to have remained ever faithful to those American principles of liberty, equality, and true social order,” he said.
