Note 209 — Chapter V · THE LEADING VARIETIES OF AMERICAN GRAPES (continued 6)

Edward Staniford Rogers was born in the old family mansion on Essex Street, Salem, Massachusetts, June 28, 1826, and died in Peabody, Massachusetts, March 29, 1899. He was the son of Nathaniel Leverett Rogers, an old-time Salem merchant, who, with his brothers John and Richard, was engaged in the maritime trade. Edward Rogers was educated in Master Ira Cheever’s school, a famous Salem school of the day, and, later, he made several voyages in his father’s ships as clerk and supercargo and, finally, passed a number of years in the counting-room of the firm in Salem. After his father’s death, Mr. Rogers lived in the old family home with his brother and their mother, and in the garden back of the house, quite large for a city lot, he indulged his natural taste for horticulture and conducted his experiments in grape hybridization.

By temperament Mr. Rogers was quiet and retiring and so generous that he gained practically no profit from his horticultural productions, for he freely gave cuttings and rooted plants of the hybrids he raised to friends and visitors before his own stock was by any means large. Mr. Rogers possessed literary ability and was an extensive reader, but could rarely be drawn into conversation excepting among his most intimate friends who were wont to “drop in” at his long, low greenhouse in the garden or at his office, extemporized in the old colonial barn at the rear of the house. After the death of his mother the old house was sold and the brothers removed to another house in Salem and some years later, after the death of his brother, Mr. Rogers bought the place, his last home, in Peabody, Massachusetts, where he cultivated trees and flowers for pleasure and experiment. An accident which resulted in a permanent lameness prevented much physical labor during his last years and probably in a measure hastened his death.