John William “Bud” Rogan
A little while back, J.R. Lind asked me if I knew that one of the tallest men to ever live had lived in Gallatin. He sent me a link to the Wikipedia page of John William “Bud” Rogan. I did some further digging and learned that there was a rumor that after his death, his family had taken him back to their place, buried him, and then covered him in concrete to keep doctors from digging him back up and taking his remains away for study.
Y’all, I am only human. You tell me there’s a block of concrete up in Sumner County with a giant in it, I have to know more. It turns out there’s a lot more to know, not just about Bud, but about the whole Rogan family.
To start with, it struck me as strange that Bud Rogan didn’t join the circus. Because Ella Harper did.
Ella Harper was a white woman also from Sumner County. She was born January 5, 1870, and died Dec. 19, 1921. She was from a family of farmers. She had a condition in which her knees bent backwards. She was known as “The Camel Girl” when she was featured in W. H. Harris’s Nickel Plate Circus. She hated the circus and eventually returned to Middle Tennessee. But she made $200 a week performing, and she couldn’t turn that money down.
Bud Rogan was born in 1868 (or possibly '65) and died in September 1905. At the time of his death, he was 8 feet, 8 inches tall, making him the tallest African-American on record and the second-tallest man. Let’s be clear that he suffered from his condition. He couldn’t walk, and he couldn’t work. He had a cart and goats to pull him around. His parents were supposedly sharecroppers. Bud, as he was known, didn’t join the circus.
I find that really curious. Bud Rogan seems to have had an option Ella Harper (or her family) didn’t feel she had. One of the jobs of segregation was to ensure white people, no matter how bad off, had it better than black people. So if you find two people whose families are farmers who are born with some unusual trait that can be exploited for money, you’d expect the more desperate person to take the money, and you’d expect the more desperate person to be the black person.
So I wanted to understand why Bud Rogan could turn down circus money. The simple answer is that Harper didn’t have much of a family, certainly no extended family, and Bud Rogan, even if he limited his social circle to people he was related to, had a small village worth of people who cared about him.
If you’re black, named Rogan, and come from Sumner County, you can probably trace your family back to Rogana, the old farm of Hugh Rogan, one of the original white settlers in the area. Hugh left Ireland, his wife and son Bernard, and came to Middle Tennessee with the Robertsons and the Donelsons to seek his fortune. At some point, it seems he falsely learned his wife had remarried, believing him dead. But when he returned to Ireland, he found her waiting for him. He brought her and Bernard to Rogana, and, after a bit, Frank Rogan was born, 20 years Bernard’s junior.
Bernard had an interesting life. He was involved in political shenanigans back in Ireland. When he got here, he went to work for the Spaniards in what is now Missouri. At some point, he ended up running around trying to clear Illinois of Indians. He’s credited with building the first wood-framed house in Peoria. So I guess that makes us to blame for Peoria. I can only assume that shortly after the wood-framed house went up, Big Al’s Strip Club sent some girls in sparkly short dresses to the house to flirt shamelessly with whoever lived there, as is Peoria tradition. But Bernard never married, and as far as history records, he kept his dick in his pants, so he’s not important to Bud’s story.
Frank, on the other hand, stayed at Rogana, farmed it and had some kids with his wife. He named those kids Clarissa, William, Charles and John.
Oddly and mysteriously, due to what I can only assume was magic or mistaken stork delivery or a really active cabbage patch, before Frank was married, a woman enslaved by Frank at Rogana had a kid named William. William (b. 1825-1880-ish) had these kids: Nimrod, Edward, Chaney, John William aka Bud (and it’s not clear who their mother or mothers were), then with his wife, Truelove, Anthony, Titus, Mary, Charles, Humphrey, Johnnie, Malissa, Louie, and possibly a son named Marshall Bernard, with a woman named Margaret.
Mary also had a son named Titus with a man named Titus Malone. Titus’ children were: Annie, James, Titus, Lewis, Bettie and Susie. Note that both William and Titus have sons named Titus and Louie/Lewis. These two brothers’ families stayed very close over the years.
There’s also another Rogan who comes into play in Bud’s story — John Rogan. John Rogan was born at Rogana in 1824, making him slightly older than Bud’s dad. His children were Mary/Maria, Sarah, Henry, Tom, Charles, Richard, Laura, Martha, Frank and John, names shared with the white Rogans and William’s family. I suspect that John is William’s brother, and possibly they share a father with the white Rogan children who share their names. Considering that John has a daughter named Maria or Mary, I think it’s possible that he’s William’s full brother, and that Mary is his mom.
(A cool side-note about John’s family is that two of John’s grandsons were Negro League Baseball players. Henry’s son, Oscar Rogan, was a ball player in Fort Wayne. Richard’s son, Wilbur “The Bullet” Rogan, is in the Baseball Hall of Fame. A cool side-side note: Wilbur’s son was known his whole long life as “Little Bullet.”)
During the Civil War, seven Rogans fought for the Union, and all but one came home alive. Since then, many Rogans have served in the military. The other thing you seem to be able to count on a Rogan for is that kind of like that old joke about Methodists that goes, “Wherever two or more are gathered in His name, Methodists will take a collection,” wherever two or more Rogans were gathered, you can bet you’re going to find a church and probably a Rogan preaching up front. I found Rogans associated with Parkers Chapel Baptist Church up in Portland, Tenn., Mt. Zion Baptist Church in Bethpage, and Durham Chapel in Bethpage.
It turns out that the Rogans weren’t sharecroppers. At least, not the vast majority of them. They owned and farmed their own land — some along Kansas Road in Sumner County and some at the intersection of Gallatin and Hartsville Road. (This is a weird thing in the census. Census records always show the vast majority of the Rogans in District 10, which historically has been pretty steady in location, in the area of Kansas Road. But unless some road out there used to be called the Hartsville Road, the current intersection that fits that description has never been in District 10.)
The members of William’s and Titus’ families who lived in Gallatin lived by the cemetery. John’s family, before they started spreading out over the Midwest, lived on Blythe near the fairgrounds.
Bud’s condition was such that he never stopped growing, and he also had ankylosis, where the bones in his joints grew together. It also seems that his muscles didn’t keep up with his bone growth, and he eventually couldn’t walk or work. He made his living, such as it was, selling pictures of himself and pictures he drew at the train station. He came to the attention of William Lackey, who went on to be a really important doctor in Gallatin, though when he first started writing about Bud, he was barely out of med school. He worked in conjunction with a dentist, Ernest Hickman. If Bud was encased in concrete, it was to keep these two from digging him up.
And I think we can all understand the various agendas at play here. Lackey and Hickman had a medical mystery right in their backyards. Bud was, at the least, in grave discomfort and would not have been in a position to turn down medical help offered him. But it’s also likely that Lackey and Hickman felt some ownership of Bud’s condition that would have been in conflict with the Rogans’ desire to not seem him dug up and displayed.
One legend recounted to me by a friend who’s a huge Gallatin history buff is that Bud’s body was buried “near the churches” on Blythe Street. My problem with this story is that it just seems hard to believe no one would have come across him by now if he was just in a yard in Gallatin. Sewer work, gas lines, new construction. How could he stay undiscovered?
But it makes sense that people would think Bud was there, because so many people knew him as John Rogan, and two John Rogans lived on Blythe. To add to the confusion, he sometimes was known as Will Rogan, and the Willards and Wilburs in the John Rogan families were sometimes called Will as well. So on the one hand, if you’re named John or Will Rogan. and you run into anyone else named John or Will, you should check to see if you’re related, because the Rogans loved those names. On the other hand, it can make it very tricky to track who exactly is where and when.
But if the legend originally started as Bud being buried “near the churches where the Rogans lived,” you could see how that would easily morph into the Blythe Street location. And he may be there. I just think it’s more likely that he is near one of the churches the Rogans helped build, in a spot they could keep an eye on.
One thing that struck me while I was doing this research is that during the time when the Rogans were enslaved, the Rogan plantation sat north of Cragfont, the Winchester house, west of the Lauderdales and Chenaults, near the Parkers.
As soon as you can find black Rogans by name in the census, so 1870, they have moved off Rogana, but they still live near Winchesters, Lauderdales, Chenaults and Parkers. So obviously, they all had formed a community during slavery. They knew each other and cared about each other, and when they were able, they looked after each other.
Even when the Rogans who left Tennessee left, they went in a family group. You might find a dad and an adult son and their families or two siblings and their families. But the Rogans did not go it alone.
There’s a story here, and one I’d like to hear some day, of how a group of people in crushing, horrific circumstances formed a community, friendships, relationships, that have lasted almost two centuries.
Bud Rogan is an interesting dude, but the reason he was able to live as long and as well as he did was that his family made it work for him. And that’s also extraordinary.
