University of Virginia Library

WILLIAM BARTON ROGERS

Rogers Hall was named in honor of William
Barton Rogers, who was Professor of
Natural Philosophy from 1835 to 1853,
and later was instrumental in the founding
of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology,
of which he was the first President. He
was born in Philadelphia 7 December
1804, the second of four brothers, all of
whom became distinguished scientists. His
father, Patrick Kerr Rogers, was one of the
men of ability forced out of Ireland by
political entanglements. The father received
the degree of Doctor of Medicine
from the University of Pennsylvania in
1806, practiced medicine there and in Baltimore,
and in 1819 was appointed Professor
of Natural Philosophy and Chemistry
at the College of William and Mary. The
son, William Barton, received training
under his father's instruction, in a school
in Baltimore, and in the college at Williamsburg.
As a graduate of William and
Mary he joined with one of his brothers in

conducting a school near Baltimore, and he
lectured before the Maryland Institute. On
the death of his father in 1828, William
Barton Rogers, then twenty-four years of
age, was named to succeed him in the professorship
at William and Mary. This post
he held until 1835, when he was called to
the position in Charlottesville. That same
year, largely as the result of his advocacy of
the value of a more thorough knowledge of
the mineral resources of the State, the Virginia
Legislature undertook a Geological
Survey with Rogers as its Chief.

Thus when he came to the University of
Virginia, Professor Rogers had already
demonstrated unusual powers in research,
in exposition, and in progressive thinking.
The eighteen years (1835 to 1853) spent in
intimate contact with Jeffersonian educational
concepts were powerful incentives in
the maturing of his creative capacity. Being
at the same time a Professor with a full
schedule of classes and the State Geologist
with field surveys in progress, there was an
onerous pressure of work. But his annual

reports and other papers on the Geology of
the Virginias, published after his death,
became standard authorities; and by the
uniform testimony of those who received
instruction from him, there were in his
lectures unusual qualities of clarity and
eloquence. There is a tradition that students
not enrolled in his courses were in
their free hours wont so to crowd into his
classes that at times he and his assistant
demonstrator were compelled to climb in
at a window to reach the platform!

The period in Charlottesville was also
one of frustration. The Virginia Legislature
lost its enthusiasm for the Geological
Survey and terminated it. In the University
the solidly entrenched lecture system was
not ready for the introduction of adequate
laboratory equipment. Morever those were
years of inordinate unruliness by a part of
the student body; and Professor Rogers, he
was Chairman of the Faculty for 1844–1845,
was deeply involved in the baffling problems
of discipline. In order to concentrate
on what he deemed should be his life work,

he sought release by resignation as early as
1848, but was persuaded to remain in Charlottesville
five years more. However, in
1853 he definitely turned to a new field of
opportunity.

On a geological expedition into New
England he had met Miss Emma Savage, a
daughter of James Savage of Lunenburg,
Massachusetts, the compiler of The Genealogical
Dictionary of New England. She
had become his wife in 1849. At the University
they lived in Pavilion VI. Through
the Savage family he came into touch with
a congenial group in Massachusetts, and
he was encouraged there to advocate his
then novel conception of an institute devoted
to technical training. There too frustration
impeded the effort, and it was not
until 1861 that legislative approval was
secured—and 1861 was a year of intense
concentration on war. However, a site for
the Massachusetts Institute of Technology
was acquired, a building programme
started, and the beginnings of a faculty and
a student body assembled. Any genealogy

of ideas must needs be inexact. Yet it may
be suggestive that in the first faculty the
Professor of Chemistry was Charles W.
Eliot, whose educational statesmanship was
soon to be proved as the President of Harvard.
Rogers himself was made President
of the Institute of Technology, and this
position he held, except for an interval of
ill health, until 1880. On 30 May 1882,
then Professor Emeritus, he died in action
while handing diplomas to the graduates of
that year.

In the Life and Letters of William Barton
Rogers, compiled by his widow with
the assistance of William T. Sedgewick,
Professor of Biology at the Massachusetts
Institute of Technology, there is a bibliography
listing ninety of his publications, of
which thirty-five are dated during his connection
with the University of Virginia.
The two volumes of the Life and Letters
are based so fully on the correspondence of
the four brothers that they might be
termed a foursome autobiography. That
fraternal combination achieved international

fame in science—in Germany they
were known as the "Gebrüder Rogers."
The eldest, James Blythe Rogers (1802–
1852), was a lecturer at the Maryland Institute
and held professorships in Cincinnati
College, the Philadelphia Medical Institute,
the Franklin Institute, and the University
of Pennsylvania. The two who were
younger than William Barton were Henry
Darwin Rogers (1808–1866), who held professorships
at Dickinson College and at the
University of Pennsylvania, was Director
of the Geological Survey of New Jersey and
Pennsylvania, and completed his career as
Regius Professor of Natural History at the
University of Glasgow in Scotland; and
Robert Empie Rogers (1813–1884), who
was Professor of Chemistry at the University
of Virginia (1842–1852), Professor and
Dean at the University of Pennsylvania,
and Professor at Jefferson Medical College
in Philadelphia. In a memoir in the Publications
of the National Academy of Science
it is affirmed that this was "a family group
scarcely to be excelled for native powers
and acquirements, in the history of science,
in this or any age or country."