Cappon, Lester Jesse, 1900-1981

Lester Jesse Cappon (1900-1981) was born in Milwaukee, Wisconsin, the son of Jesse Cappon and Mary E. Geisinger Cappon. He studied music, earning a diploma from the Wisconsin Conservatory of Music in 1920, but was also interested in history and earned degrees at the University of Wisconsin at Madison and at Harvard University, acquiring a Ph.D. in 1928. In 1925, Cappon went to the University of Virginia, where he worked on editions of Virginia historical publications and newspapers funded by the university’s Institute for Research in the Social Sciences. He returned to the University of Virginia as an assistant professor of history, where he taught until 1945. He also served as the Univeristy of Virginia's archivist.

In 1945 Cappon moved to Williamsburg, VA and where he became the first archivist for the Colonial Williamsburg Foundation and the first editor of publications of the Institute of Early American History and Culture (IEAHC), an organization sponsored by the College of William and Mary and the Colonial Williamsburg Foundation. In 1954, he became the second director of the IEAHC where he produced the 2 volume edition The Adams–Jefferson Letters: The Complete Correspondence between Thomas Jefferson and Abigail and John Adams (1959). As director of the OIEAHC, Cappon also guided the pulication of a scholarly edition of the John Marshall Papers (eventually published in 10 volumes), with assistance from the scholars Julian Boyd, Walter Muir Whitehill, Louis B. Wright, and institute staff members James Smith and Philip Hamer. He was an important player in the formative era of American documentary editing standards and establishing the practice of documentary editing as a scholarly field.

Cappon moved to Chicago in 1969 to become a research fellow at the Newberry Library, where he edited the Atlas of Early American History: The Revolutionary Era 1760-1790, which was a groundbreaking reference work in historical georgraphy published in 1976. He continued his research and writing until his death on August 24, 1981.

During his career as an archivist, scholarly editory, and historian, Cappon served as president of several major professional associations including the Southern Historical Association (1949), the Society of American Archivists (1957), and the Association for Documentary Editing (1979), being a founding member of the latter two professional groups.