Jack Lamar Mayfield, Jr.

Published 9:44 am Thursday, October 25, 2018

Jack Lamar Mayfield, Jr., 71, died Saturday, Oct. 13, 2018, at Oxford Health and Rehab in Oxford.

Visitation will be held on Tuesday, Oct. 30, at 9 a.m. at Burns Belfry Museum and Multicultural Center. A memorial service led by Dr. David Ard will follow at 10 a.m.

A fifth-generation Oxonian, Mayfield was born Nov. 23, 1946, to the late Jack Lamar and Nannie Seale Mayfield. He attended University High School and graduated from Oxford High School. He graduated from the University of Mississippi in 1969 with a bachelor’s degree in Business Administration.

After a career in the insurance industry in Jackson and Memphis, he returned to Oxford in 1990 to pursue his lifelong passion for Mississippi and Oxford history. He studied history at Ole Miss and taught history at Marshall Academy and South Panola High School. For more than a dozen years he was a history columnist for The Oxford Eagle, penning hundreds of “A Sense of Place” columns that proved so authoritative, they were compiled into volumes distributed by the Lafayette County Historical and Genealogical Society. He authored the history publications “Images of America: Oxford and Ole Miss” and “Postcards of America: Oxford and Ole Miss.”

For more than 10 years, he was a common sight aboard Oxford’s double-decker tour buses, leading tours for Visit Oxford. He retired from giving tours after being diagnosed with throat cancer in 2016, and the turret room in the Visit Oxford offices was named in his honor.

He was preceded in death by his daughter, Amanda Mayfield Scott. He is survived by two sisters, Nancy Hawkins and her husband, Tom of Cordova, Tenn. and Sylvia Pryor and her husband, Jim of Oxford; a son-in-law, Matt Scott of Oxford; four grandchildren, Cami Dacus, Thomas Dacus, Ella Scott and Emma Scott; and a great-grandson, Corbin Dacus.