William Arthur Rogers

William Arthur Rogers. [Born] 1851.

At the time of his death the oldest living Centurion. Ninety-four years old; forty-nine years a Centurion. Proposed for membership by J. Wells Champney who was elected in 1879; seconded by Nicholas Murray Butler, then a member of only five years’ standing [sic: seven years’ standing].

In Buffalo, his home, there was no aspect of life, industrial, intellectual, charitable, religious and aesthetic, in which he did not play an important and necessary part. Moustached and bearded, he looked his typical essentially 19th century career. A gentleman of the old school, he gave only one interview to the press, on his 88th birthday. Until about five years ago he came as regularly to monthly meetings as a resident member, nine hundred miles round trip from Buffalo.

His firm, Rogers and Brown, after the turn of the century, became the greatest pig iron smelter and distributor in the world. The great names of American business were linked with his; Elbert Gary, Charles Schwab, Mark Hanna, Walter Scranton, Charles Goodyear, Centurion John G. Milburn. The great American names of ore deposits and sources of power appear with his: Tonawanda, Lackawanna, Niagara; Mesabi, Marquette, Menominee; Susquehanna, Scranton, Punxatawney.

There were Rogers ore boats plying the Great Lakes, and President-elect McKinley from his home in Canton, Ohio, sparked the tinder that lighted the fires of the Rogers’ Tonawanda blast furnace. Its operations were one of the first fruits of the “full dinner-pail” campaign; for Rogers and Brown had demurred at opening the plant unless McKinley and “sound money” triumphed.

Those were the days of simple issues and direct action!

In his career there were meetings with Porfirio Diaz at the Chapultepec Palace in Mexico; with King George V of England, King Albert of Belgium, the President of China, the Gaekwar of Baroda, the Maharaja of Mysore, Those were indeed the days!

The Century’s servants, who know all about us, report that he was a very kindly man, of no ostentation, and that he loved the Century. Ninety-four years of the distinctive kind of success which was the American success of his times, he had. And well might he say as he did at his only press interview: “I have had many opportunities in my life. I have been greatly blessed. It has been a great era to live through.”

Source: Henry Allen Moe Papers, Mss.B.M722. Reproduced by permission of American Philosophical Society Library & Museum, Philadelphia

Henry Allen Moe
Henry Allen Moe Papers, 1946 Memorials