Henry Lyons was the oldest of six children born to Isaac and Rachel Cohen Lyons, a brood that also included Isabel Rebecca Lyons Mordecai. Isaac had immigrated from Oberelsbach in Bavaria to Philadelphia, where married the daughter of Jacob Cohen, hazzan at Mikveh Israel. The couple moved to Charleston around 1805 and then to Columbia in the early 1820s, where Isaac and his sons opened a grocery. The family maintained ties to Philadelphia, and it was there that Henry married Elizabeth Wolff in 1842. Lyons would emerge as a prominent member of this rapidly growing South Carolina town’s commercial and political elite and an active member in the Jewish community there. He became one of the directors of the Commercial Bank of Columbia, a member of the Hebrew Benevolent Society, warden of the town for eight years (one of six members of the town council) and was elected intendant (equivalent of mayor) in 1850. His sister-in-law, Boanna Wolff, travelled to Columbia from Philadelphia, where Rebecca Gratz had founded the nation’s first Hebrew Sunday school. Boanna, inspired by Gratz’s work, established the Columbia Israelite Sunday School—Columbia’s first—and ran the school for three years.