By Casey Jarmes
I’m just going to cut to the chase. There is an American Revolutionary War soldier buried in Keokuk County. This fact surprised me when I learned it, given the large gap between the Revolution and the beginning of this community. The Revolutionary War began in April, 1775, with the Battles of Lexington and Concord. It ended eight years later, in September, 1783, with the signing of the 1783 Treaty of Paris. Iowa was opened to white settlers in 1832, following the Black Hawk War and subsequent Black Hawk Purchases. The southeast corner of this county was opened for settlement following the Second Black Hawk Purchase, in 1837, and the first settler, Aaron Miller, arrived in 1838. The rest of the county, including Sigourney, where this soldier is buried, was opened for settlement in 1842. For a Revolutionary War soldier to have lived here, he would have had to have been a very young soldier, who travelled across the country to settle in new territory, when he was already elderly.
Sure enough, this guess matches this week’s subject. His name was Achilles Rogers, and right off the bat, I’d like to note that this is an excellent name. Rogers was born in Albemarle County, Colony of Virginia, in 1761. In 1781, when he was 19, Rogers enlisted as a carpenter in the Quartermaster Generals Department in the district of Charlottesville. He served from Jan. 1 to Sept. 30. I could find no details about his actual war experience.
In 1814, Rogers married a woman named Eliza; I could find no details about her, other than that she married Achilles Rogers and presumably died sometime before 1846. Achilles and Eliza moved to Indiana and had five daughters: Eliza, Lucy, Maria, Lindsey and Mary. The youngest of these children, Mary, was born in 1827, when her father would have been 66! Achilles Rogers, it seems, did not let his age slow him down. Also, I find it odd that he would name his daughters Mary and Maria; those names are too similar.
Maria married a man named Martin Jacobs, who was awarded land in Keokuk County for having fought in an Indian War. In 1846, after Martin passed away, Maria wrote to her father, asking him to stay with her and her children on their farm. Rogers, already in his mid-eighties, moved to Iowa.
In 1854, when Rogers was either 92 or 93, a Cholera outbreak swept through Iowa. He fell ill and died at the Jacobs farm, a few hours later. Before dying, Rogers requested that a large boulder at the farm be used as his tombstone. He was buried in Pennington Cemetery, south of Sigourney, without a funeral. Maria ended up dying six years later, at the age of either 39 or 40.
On April 12, 1925, that year’s Easter, Rogers was given a proper funeral by the James McElwee Daughters of the American Revolution Chapter, who placed a bronze plate and grave marker at his tombstone. The ceremony drew a large crowd and inspired this buck-wild paragraph in the April 16 issue of the Keokuk County News, which begins poetically then veers off into absurdity.
“The sweet spring zephyrs wafting the fragrance of the swelling buds and tender blossoms bespeaking the coming of nature’s loveliness together with the balmy air brought to the poetic mind a vision of a lad over a century ago in the springtime of life while just bursting into the bloom of his young manhood answering to the call of patriotism enlisting in the Continental Army as a carpenter and as willing to lay down his life if necessary to secure American independence and the right of liberty as was that other “Carpenter” who suffered Calvary to give to the world eternal life. Achilles Rogers lived to be 93 years of age and in 1853 when this country was undergoing a scourge of cholera he became a victim of its ravages and succumbed in a very few hours. No funeral ceremony of religious rite could be performed under the circumstances and his body was consigned to mother earth without the tender words of eulogy he merited. The beautiful ceremonies thus held were after all the eulogy and tribute and everything appropriate to perpetuate his memory.”
In my research, I was unable to find any real personal details about Rogers, to give a sense of what he was like, as a person, which was disappointing. The old articles I read about the man focused almost exclusively on the fact that he is one of only a small handful of Revolutionary War veterans buried in Iowa and the fact that he is the only one buried in Keokuk County. But, the thing is, he isn’t. There is another.
On a list of local soldiers, sorted by war, that the Keokuk County Historical Society has, I found another man, Thomas Edenfield, listed as a Revolutionary War veteran. The problem is, I could find absolutely nothing else about Edenfield, other than the fact that he is buried in Knox Cemetery, without a headstone. The historical society told me that they don’t know anything more either. Edenfield’s story has been lost to time.
