L. H. Butterfield (1909–1982)

Lyman Henry Butterfield was an American historian and biographer, and is best known as the first editor-in-chief of The Adams Papers, a twenty-volume collection of diaries, letters and other writings.

Born in Lyndonville, New York in 1909, to high school teacher and principal Roy L. Butterfield and his wife Ethel Butterfield, he was educated at Harvard, receiving a BA in 1930 and a MA in 1934. He married Elizabeth Anne Eaton of Cleveland, Ohio in 1935, and the two went on to have two children. He taught English at Franklin and Marshall College in Lancaster, Pennsylvania, during which period he discovered an interest in the late colonial and early Federal period of American history. He edited a collection of Dr. Benjamin Rush' letters, published in 1951, and worked with Julian P. Boyd of the Princeton University Library, on The Papers of Thomas Jefferson.

In 1954 Butterfield was named editor-in-chief of a project to organize and publish the Adams' family papers, which included several hundred thousand manuscripts. The first of twenty volumes was published in 1961. In addition to his work on this massive project, he served on the boards of numerous organizations, and contributed to countless other archival and historical projects. Ill health forced him to retired in 1975, and he died in 1982.

(source: Whitfield J. Bell, Jr.'s obituary, for The American Antiquarian Society)