Charlton Ross "Chauncey" DeVault (16 May 1910–2 February 1980), minor league baseball executive, was the son of Georgia Sprinkle Meredith Daugherty DeVault and her second husband, the farmer Orgie Milton DeVault, and was born in Sullivan County, Tennessee. After completing high school in nearby Kingsport, he matriculated at Emory and Henry College, where in 1932 he was an all-state center and captain of the football team. DeVault, almost always known as C. R. DeVault or Chauncey DeVault, received a B.A. in 1933. He went to work as an assistant coach at Kingsport High School but soon returned to Virginia as the head football coach at Honaker High School, in Russell County. In 1935 DeVault moved to Wise County as athletic director and coach at Appalachia High School. He married Margaret Masengill, a high school mathematics teacher in Blountville, Tennessee, on 9 June 1939. They had two sons and one daughter.

By 1940 DeVault had become athletic director and head coach at Virginia High School, in Bristol, Virginia, where within two years he had also assumed responsibilities as principal. DeVault took graduate courses at the University of Virginia and at Teachers College of Columbia University and received an M.A. from the latter institution in 1942. As an officer in the United States Naval Reserve beginning in the spring of 1943, he served in the Pacific theater as a lieutenant junior grade. After World War II, he settled in Bristol, Tennessee, where he established a sporting goods store named DeVault's, Incorporated.

Having served the previous year as vice president, in August 1947 DeVault became president of the Appalachian League, one of the few professional minor league baseball associations that had continued to offer games during World War II. Propelled by the wave of postwar prosperity, the Appalachian League had expanded from four to eight teams, but by 1947, several incidents involving umpires, players, managers, and fans had led the league directors to elect a new president. DeVault was soon tested in another incident involving a manager, umpire, and player, and he moved quickly to fine and suspend the offending parties.

Although Jackie Robinson had taken the field for the Brooklyn Dodgers in 1947, the integration of baseball proved contentious, especially in the South's minor leagues. It wasn't until 1952 that the Appalachian League signed Rufus Hatten, its first African American player. In 1958 the Dixie Series, an annual interleague game, pitted the Texas League's integrated Corpus Christi Giants against the Southern Association champions, the Birmingham Barons, but a Birmingham ordinance forbidding white players from taking the field with African Americans put the Dixie Series in jeopardy. The president of the National Association of Professional Baseball Leagues (NAPBL) appointed DeVault that year to represent him on the board of control that governed the Dixie Series. The NAPBL president had previously called on DeVault to represent the Class D leagues at a conference of minor league presidents in 1954.

DeVault also had to grapple with the challenges posed by declining attendance during the 1950s as televised major league baseball games and other competing leisure activities threatened minor league baseball. On 24 February 1956 the Appalachian League, then the oldest operating league in Class D baseball, folded. Under DeVault's leadership the league revived for the 1957 season as a Class B rookie six-team league playing a seventy-game season. In 1963 the league became part of the major league's player development system under the new Rookie League classification. In 1969 the NAPBL named DeVault the King of Baseball, an award given annually for dedication to the sport, and in 1979 he received the George M. Trautman Award for his longtime service to minor league baseball.

While still operating his sporting goods store, DeVault served at various times on the board of education in Bristol, Tennessee, on the board of directors of the Bristol Boys' Club, and as president of the local Lions Club. Charlton Ross "Chauncey" DeVault was still president of the Appalachian League, and probably the longest-serving minor league baseball executive in the country, when he died of abdominal and lung cancer at a Bristol hospital on 2 February 1980. He was buried at Glenwood Cemetery, in Bristol, Tennessee. The following year Emory and Henry College named its baseball field the C. R. "Chauncey" DeVault Memorial Field (later Porterfield/DeVault Field), and the Bristol White Sox began playing on Chauncey DeVault Field at DeVault Memorial Stadium, in Bristol, Virginia.

Sources Consulted:
Birth date in World War II Selective Service System Draft Registration Cards (1940–1947), RG 147, National Archives and Records Administration, Washington, D.C., and Social Security application, Social Security Administration, Office of Earnings Operations, Baltimore, Md.; Kingsport Times, 22 Oct. 1939, 5, 6 Aug. 1947; Bluefield Daily Telegraph, 20 May 1948; Bristol Herald Courier, 9 Jan., 25 Feb. 1956, 5 Dec. 1969; Washington Post, 25 Feb. 1956; Marie Tedesco, "Appalachia Becomes Mainstream: From Down-Home Baseball to the Rookie League in Johnson City, Tennessee," Journal of East Tennessee History, 64 (1992): 20–40; Death Certificate, Bristol, Bureau of Vital Statistics, Commonwealth of Virginia Department of Health, Record Group 36, Library of Virginia; obituaries in Bristol Herald Courier (portrait), Richmond Times-Dispatch, Roanoke Times and World-News, and Washington Post, all 3 Feb. 1980; memorial in Emory and Henry Alumnus 31 (summer 1980): 23.

Written for the Dictionary of Virginia Biography by Tom Lee.

How to cite this page:
Tom Lee, "Charlton Ross "Chauncey" DeVault (1910–1980)," Dictionary of Virginia Biography, Library of Virginia (1998– ), published 2022 (http://www.lva.virginia.gov/public/dvb/bio.asp?b=DeVault_Charlton_Ross, accessed [today's date]).

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