Jesse Green Rogers lived on the Home Place with his sons family until he died in 1872. As children we Rogers boys of Ozark often visited our aunts. The three daughters eventually married successful farmers and lived within a few miles of the Home Place. 1855), and Aunt Mandy (Amanda Malvina, b. The five who reached adulthood were "Uncle Doc" (Isaac Newton, b. Grandfather Rogers offspring numbered six, one of whom died in infancy. Both North and South valued a physicians skills. During the Civil War Grandfather Rogers sympathized with the Union cause, but he was never molested or even threatened by the local Confederate vigilantes, the "bushwhackers," because they desperately needed the services of a doctor. The romantic bridegroom, Robert Doak Rogers, who was to become our grandfather, was both a farmer and a country doctor. A whitepainted wooden structure, it was characterized by the tall chimneys of two massive fireplaces, one at each end.įather used to tell his sons that his own father literally stole our grandmother to be his bride, carrying her away from her home on horseback, pursued by two of her brothers who attempted unsuccessfully to rescue her. The house was built before the Civil War and resembled in a modest way the much larger mansions found on southern plantations of the period. It was a good farm, this Home Place, and it is still owned by a branch of the Rogers family. Homelands in southeastern United States, a sorrowful journey often referred to as "the trail where they cried," or "the trail of tears." One of the routes passed through Springfield, Missouri, a few miles from what became the Rogers "Home Place." Our Grandmother Rogers (Juritta Watts Rogers) was a quarter-breed Cherokee, and both Rogers and Watts are prominent names in the tribal rolls.įather, born in 1853, grew up as a farm boy on a spread of some 300 acres about eight miles from Ozark, part of it still woodland during my boyhood. There is no record of the first Watts, which was the maiden name of my fathers mother, but it is believed that both the Rogers and the Watts families went west with the Cherokee Indians in 1838-39 at the time of the forced removal of the Cherokees to Oklahoma from their native Jesse Green Rogers, born in 1791 and a native of Tennessee, was the first Rogers to settle in the vicinity of Ozark. Below the townsite, almost level with the river, is Bluff Spring, a fine water supply for the early settlers. In fact, we often called it Finley Creek. Missouri, lies on a plateau up the hill from the Finley River, a small stream that is not really a river. Many geologists maintain that the Ozark Mountains, gently eroded and beautiful, were the first range in America to emerge from the sea. They called the region Aux Arcs, meaning "at the curves" or "bends." Pronounced ozark, the name was accepted by the settlers, who changed the spelling to the English version. Long before the Rogers family took up residence in the Ozarks, French traders and adventurers had been there, traveling in their boats through the streams that wind around the hills of northern Arkansas and southern Missouri - trading with the Indians, trapping and fishing.
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