Dennis Thomas Flynn

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Dennis Thomas Flynn (February 13, 1861 – June 19, 1939) was an American lawyer, publisher, and Republican politician who served as the Oklahoma Territory’s delegate to the U.S. House of Representatives from 1893 to 1897 and again from 1899 to 1903.

Born in Phoenixville, Pennsylvania, Flynn became an orphan at a young age and grew up in a Catholic orphanage in Buffalo, New York. He studied at Canisius College, practiced law, and published the Kiowa Herald in Kiowa, Kansas, where he also served as Kiowa’s first postmaster. He later moved to Guthrie, Oklahoma Territory, and was Guthrie’s postmaster from 1889 to 1892.

As a Republican, Flynn was elected Territorial Delegate to the Fifty-third Congress in 1893 and reelected in 1894. He lost reelection in 1896, but was elected again in 1898 and served until 1903, leaving after choosing not to run in 1902. After leaving office, he returned to private law practice in Oklahoma City.

Flynn was Oklahoma’s first Republican National Committeeman and a delegate to the 1912 Republican National Convention. He ran unsuccessfully for the U.S. Senate in 1908 and was once considered for Secretary of the Interior. He died in Oklahoma City in 1939 and is buried in Fairlawn Cemetery. He was married to Addie M. Blanton Flynn and had four children, including Olney F. Flynn; his oldest son Dennis died young, and he had a daughter named Dorothy and a son named Streeter Flynn as well.