Bill Segars Just Got the Order of the Palmetto

The Order of the Palmetto is the highest civilian honor the state of South Carolina gives out. The governor hands them out personally. The list of past recipients is long and includes a lot of names you’d recognize from history books and highway signs.

Last week, Bill Segars was added to it.

Bill is a client of ours. He runs the SC Revolutionary War Markers Project, which we built the website for. We’re writing about it here because we’re genuinely proud, and because the whole thing is the kind of story that reminds us why we do this job in the first place.

Who Bill is

If you’ve spent any time in South Carolina chasing Revolutionary War history, you’ve probably run into Bill or his work without realizing it. He’s been documenting Rev War sites across the state for years. Not from behind a desk. In person. Driving to backroads. Walking through fields that used to be battlegrounds. Standing where things actually happened and figuring out exactly where to put a marker so people a hundred years from now can stand in the same spot.

The man knows this stuff. Not in the way a tour guide knows it. In the way somebody who has spent decades of his own time and his own money and his own gas running down leads knows it. He’s a historian in the fullest sense of the word, which is to say he’s an obsessive, and he’s generous with what he knows.

The Order of the Palmetto is a recognition of all of that. Decades of work. On his own, mostly. For the kind of recognition most people in his position never get.

What we built, and why it mattered

A few years ago, Bill through our partners at SCART came to us because the project needed a website. Not just a brochure site. A real one. A place where every marker could live with its coordinates, its historical context, its photos, and the story behind the spot it marks. Something that would still be useful to a researcher in 2050 looking up a specific skirmish from 1780.

We built it. It’s the kind of project we love, which is to say the kind where the person running it cares more about the subject than almost anything else in their life, and the technology is just a way to get that caring in front of other people.

The site isn’t flashy. That was deliberate. It’s organized, it’s searchable, it loads fast on a phone with bad reception out in the middle of nowhere, and it respects the subject matter. When someone pulls over on the side of a backroad to look up the marker they just drove past, the site works. That’s what it was supposed to do.

We are stewarding it after launch. We’ve been doing small updates ever since. New markers get added. New photos go up. Historical context gets refined as Bill digs deeper on specific sites. The site isn’t done, because the project isn’t done. It’s a living record of a thing somebody is still actively building.

Why this one hit different

We’ve built a lot of websites. We’ve worked with a lot of good people. We’re not going to pretend every project moves us the same way.

But some projects do. The ones where the client is doing the work mostly out of love, where there isn’t a venture-funded business plan behind it, where the measure of success is something a lot slower and quieter than quarterly revenue, those hit different. You can feel it on the first call. The person on the other end of the line isn’t trying to grow a brand. They’re trying to make sure something gets remembered.

Bill is one of those. The project is one of those. Watching him get recognized by the state for work he was going to do whether anybody noticed or not is one of the better things that’s happened in our inbox this year.

The small thing we want to say

We’re not claiming any credit for Bill’s award. The Order of the Palmetto is for his decades of work, not our website. If we’d never been involved, he still would have gotten it. He would have done the research anyway. He would have told the stories anyway. The man was going to make this happen with or without our web studio in his corner.

But we got to help. We got to build the tool that made the work more findable, more durable, and more useful to people who want to go stand where things happened. That’s a small contribution to a very big project, and we’re proud of the small part we played.

More importantly, we got to spend a few months working alongside somebody who is actually doing something that matters. That’s not a small thing when you’ve been in this industry long enough. A lot of the work in web is in service of goals that are, to put it kindly, not that interesting. Helping Bill was interesting. Helping Bill is still interesting.

So. Congratulations, Bill. The honor is well-earned. The work is well-done. South Carolina is luckier than it knows to have you doing what you do.

The crew raised a glass over at the studio when the news came through. We’ll raise another one next time you’re in town.