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Stan Beason once said that his reason for launching an alternative community newspaper in Caroline was to give all of the county's people a voice.
"We really want to be a paper that is a public forum," Beason told The Free Lance-Star in January 1993 as the first edition of the Caroline Times-Post hit newspaper racks. "We will promote the exchange of information, and challenge anyone who has an opinion to give us a shot, and we'll print it."
Though his newspaper didn't last the year, he made promoting a freer exchange of ideas in Caroline his life's work.
Beason, a journalist, historian and political activist who was well-known throughout Caroline, died Tuesday after a short battle with lung cancer. He was 44.
Friends say the county will miss his fastidious efforts to research, record and preserve local history and to foster a greater kinship between all of the county's varied residents.
Though originally from Alabama, he moved to Virginia in 1989 and made Caroline his adopted home.
"He lived and breathed Caroline," said Dennis Donachy, Bowling Green's former town manager and a close friend of Beason. "You couldn't talk to him about anything without getting some little history lesson."
Before establishing the Times-Post, Beason had served about two years as editor of Caroline's established community newspaper, the Caroline Progress. He also launched a short-lived historical magazine, Caroline Edition, and he continued to do free-lance reporting for the Caroline Progress and The Free Lance-Star.
At the time of his death, he owned and operated Studio 7, a graphic design and publishing business responsible for getting government meetings and school athletic events broadcast on cable access television. His widow, Elizabeth, will continue to run the business from her home near Bowling Green.
Though he never ran for public office himself, he was known for challenging elected officials through his involvement in quasi-political civic organizations.
For example, he proposed an African-American monument for the courthouse lawn when he was on the county tourism committee. Then, when his idea morphed into a multicultural monument that he didn't support, he worked with the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People to try to win a prominent place on the courthouse lawn to recognize black history.
He also butted heads with the Caroline Board of Supervisors over its treatment of a historic jail on the courthouse green, and with the Bowling Green Town Council over its refusal to support a new visitors center in town and, recently, its treatment of Donachy, whom the council fired earlier this summer.
Though he was known for speaking his mind, Beason was admired because he wasn't all talk, said Cleo Coleman, who worked with Beason through Historic Port Royal Inc.
"He wasn't so much a presiding officer of anything, but a hard worker," she said. "He was an idea person and a person who was diligent about completing whatever task needed to be done."
Beason was also continually challenging his own beliefs about history and politics, said Linda Thomas, a close friend.
She said that she was very impressed with his willingness to listen to her perspective, as a black female Civil War re-enactor, on the use of the Confederate flag and other Confederate symbols.
"For Stan, it always kept coming back to that Southern point of view that [the flag] was part of his culture," she said. "I helped him see it was part of my culture, too."
Over time, she said, he asked her about the flag several times. And when he did, he said he did something unusual.
"He took down his defenses to hear my answer," Thomas said. "He didn't have to be right and I didn't have to be wrong. He didn't have to be guilty and I didn't have to be a victim. We could really hear each other."
To reach RUTH FINCH: 540/374-5418 rfinch@freelancestar.com