Without money and without price

Dr. David Rogers slept in a cave on his own land and left twelve hundred acres to the orphans of this county. Three books describe the man at length. Not one of them names a single child who lived on it.

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He came to Clearspring Township in 1833 from Wayne County, New York, and the county history is blunt about why.

He entered twelve hundred and eighty acres in Clearspring and Eden, as a speculator. Then he stayed. For the last fifteen or eighteen years of his life he lived here almost continually, collecting herbs and roots for medicine and attending to a practice.

He was, the book says, a naturalist.

He would often spend the summer in a cave or in a slight shed, preferring to have nothing more artificial between him and the canopy of heaven. His house, a sort of adobe contrivance, was on his land in Section 22, but he lived much of the time with his neighbor, Erastus Nelson.

The 1920 history adds that he sold the roots and extracts he prepared to eastern firms, and that he was single. Elsewhere the same volume calls him an odd character, in many ways, but possessed of good training.

The 1882 book is shorter about him: an eccentric old man and bachelor, who at one time had an extensive practice as a physician.

He was buried on a little hill overlooking the Haw Patch road, under a shaft of marble.

He was the friend of the invalid, and gave medicine without money and without price.

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Nobody can agree when he died.

The 1882 history says February 1871 in one chapter and simply 1871 in another. The county atlas of 1893 says April. And both county histories quote that same shaft and read the year differently: the 1882 book prints 1874, the 1920 book prints 1871.

The stone also carries his birth, the second of June 1786, and his age at death, eighty-five years eight months and twenty-two days. Count that forward and you get the twenty-fourth of February, 1872, which is a date no source states.

Four readings of one death, and the stone's own arithmetic agrees with none of them.

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Three years before he died he made a will, and it is one sentence long in every book that carries it.

In his will, made in 1868, he bequeathed all his real estate in the county "to the Commissioners of the County of La Grange and their successors in office in trust forever, for the use and benefit of the orphan poor and for other destitute persons of said county."

All of it. Several hundred acres of valuable land, the 1920 history calls it, out of the twelve hundred and eighty he had entered.

His heirs sued.

They argued the bequest was too indefinite to stand, and they took it to the Supreme Court of Indiana, and the will was sustained. No source gives the case, the year, or how long the county waited on it. This is the second time that court appears in the county's record and the second time it turned on a technicality.

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And then, having won, the county did nothing for eleven years.

Here is the 1882 history, writing more than a decade after his death:

No special disposition is made of this fund, as yet, by the Commissioners.

The same volume prints, in its table of what the county spent that year, a line between the bounty for fox scalps and the account for public ditches.

On account of estate of David Rogers, two thousand nine hundred and eleven dollars and eighty-one cents.

That is just under a tenth of everything LaGrange County disbursed that year, and in the book it is a category.

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The home opened the year after that book was printed.

The 1920 history says it was thirty-seven years old when written, which puts it at 1883. It stood in Clearspring Township, seven miles south of the county seat, with eighty acres around it to help support it. The 1893 atlas says a substantial frame building was erected, and that James B. Chandler of Clearspring had charge of it from 1886.

By 1919 the superintendent was Rascelus Gushwa, who had run the county infirmary for six and a half years before that, then gone back to his own farm, then taken the home from 1906 to 1911, then gone back to his farm again, and then been called a third time in March of 1919. He and his wife had it between them.

Children were taken from two years old to seventeen.

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Here is the whole of what this county's books record about the children.

This Home is now thirty-seven years old and has cared for two hundred and twenty-six orphan girls and boys. There are now seven girls and three boys in this institution.

Two hundred and twenty-six in thirty-seven years. Ten of them in the house when the book was written, seven girls and three boys.

Not one of them is named. No source says where any of them came from, who their people were, how they arrived, how they left, or what became of them afterwards. There is no adoption in the record, no placement, no discharge, no death.

They are a total, a residency figure and an age range.

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The man who left them the land is described in three books. His cave, his adobe house, the herbs, the eastern firms he sold to, his neighbour's name, the shaft over his grave and the words carved on it. The two hundred and twenty-six children who lived on his eighty acres are a number in one sentence.

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And the county's opinion of the whole thing changed completely in thirty-eight years.

In 1882 it was an unspent fund and a line in a ledger. By 1920 the same facts read like this:

…therefore the county now has what is known as "Rogers Orphans Home," a lasting monument to this good man's memory. It may be added that it is not wealth and ordinary fame that men may attain to, that keeps their memory fresh in the minds of those who come after them, but such deeds as the above.

Nothing about the children had changed in between. Nothing about the children was ever written down.