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Longtime Burtonsville resident and community activist Stuart Rochester died at home Wednesday after a decade-long battle with skin cancer. He was 63.

During that time, Rochester served tirelessly on the East County Citizens Advisory Board, advocating on matters concerning Burtonsville and the surrounding communities of eastern Montgomery County. He also was chair of the Fairland Master Plan Citizens Advisory Committee, which laid out zoning, transportation and environmental recommendations for Burtonsville over the next 30 years.

Reached at her home in Burtonsville on Thursday morning, his wife, Shelley Rochester, said her husband was modest in his accomplishments and before his death said he did not want grand recognition of his service to the community.

"For all of his outspokenness and all of the hard work and long, long hours that he put in to the community, he did not want any kind of major formal recognition," she said.

Rochester was diagnosed with melanoma, a malignant form of skin cancer, about a decade ago, she said. Shelley Rochester said the treatment process dragged along slowly until about three years ago, when his cancer took a turn for the worst.

Days before his death, Rochester submitted written testimony to the County Council opposing a storage unit site that wants to move to Burtonsville.

"Right to the bitter end he was active," said Sammie Young, who worked with Rochester for four years on the recent Fairland Master Plan.

When he was not working in Burtonsville, Rochester was a historian for the Department of Defense in Washington, D.C.

In his spare time, he co-wrote a book, "Honor Bound: The History of American Prisoners of War in Southeast Asia 1961-1973," with Defense colleague Frederick Kiley in 1999. The Journal of American History called it "the most definitive book to date about the American prisoner-of-war experience in Southeast Asia during the Vietnam War era."