David Rogers Chesnutt, 74, formerly of Bay Minette, died of throat cancer at home in Hardwick, Vt. on Dec. 15, 2015.
Born in Athens, Ala. in 1940, the son of Thomas Brice Chesnutt and Lena (Moss) Chesnutt, Dr. Chesnutt spent his early years in Prattville, moving to Bay Minette in 1951.
He graduated from Baldwin County High School in 1958. He earned a BA in journalism from the University of Alabama in 1962 and a MA in history from Auburn University in 1967, after which he returned to Bay Minette as one of the original faculty members of Bay Minette State Junior College (now Faulkner State Community College) before earning a Ph.D. at the University of Georgia in 1973.
Chesnutt spent 35 years as research professor in the History Department at the University of South Carolina where he served as associate editor and then editor of the Papers of Henry Laurens, a 16-volume collection of the letters of the leader of revolutionary activity in South Carolina during the American Revolution. Laurens, a former president of the Continental Congress, participated in the negotiations which led to the peace of Paris in 1783, which brought the war to an end.
Chesnutt was one of the founding members of the Association for Documentary Editing in the late 1970s, and he served as its president, from 1991-1992.
In the mid 1970s, Chesnutt started to apply computers to scholarship in the humanities when he developed the first program for creating a back-of-the-book index. In the 1980s and 1990s, he worked with a small group of scholars from the U.S. and Europe to develop the Text Encoding Initiative (TEI), a protocol for publishing humanities documents on the infant World Wide Web.
His work, in what is now called digital humanities, culminated in the Model Editions Partnership, which demonstrated five different ways in which fully edited documentary editions, such as the Laurens Papers, could be served up on the Web.
For 23 years, Chesnutt served as a member of the South Carolina Historical Records Advisory Board. In 2005, Gov. Mark Sanford presented him with the Order of the Palmetto, South Carolina’s highest civilian honor for extraordinary lifetime achievement and service to the state and nation.
Chesnutt owned a small desktop publishing business which published scholarly books, and for more than 35 years he edited and published Manuscripts, the journal of the Manuscript Society.
He is survived by his wife, Elizabeth Dow of Hardwick, Vt.; his son, James, daughter-in-law, Allison Narver and granddaughter, Kate of London, England; twin daughters, Catherine of New York City and Elizabeth of Columbia, S.C.; brothers Thomas B. of St. Petersburg, Fla. and Samuel W. of St. Helena Island, S.C.; sister, Carol B. of Birmingham; and six nieces and nephews.
He was a Southern gentleman in the best sense of the word — genteel, kind, generous and wise — a pleasure to work with, even if you disagreed with him.
A memorial service will be held in the summer.
In lieu of flowers, donations in his name should go to Hardwick Historical Society, P.O. Box 177, Hardwick, VT 05843, or the Manuscript Society, 14003 Rampart Ct., Baton Rouge, LA 70810, or the Association for Documentary Editing, c/o R. Ondine LeBlanc, ADE treasurer, Massachusetts Historical Society, 1154 Boylston St., Boston, MA 02215.
