A small advertisement in the Pantagraph 100 years ago promised a lasting adornment for your home. An artist had been retained for just ten days. This artist would create a beautiful enlargement of your "photo or Kodak" to place in your home. This artist would be working in the front window of the store at 311 North Main for ten days, a source of wonderful entertainment, if you could endure the February cold.
I wonder if any of these portraits still exist in Bloomington or the surrounding countryside?
R C Rogers came to Bloomington as a young boy and had all his education here. He began working with Maxwell books in 1875 and bought out that store in 1884 when the owner moved to Chicago. He continued work there until the great fire of 1900 and then rebuilt at 311 N. Main, where he established Rogers Wall Paper.
This drawing is from an 1883 drawing in the Pantagraph, when Maxwell's was on the south corner of the square, where the Corn Belt Bank is. Although Rogers' obituary states that he took over the business in 1884, the 1883 ad states that he is the proprietor. This store was the first to have electric light in Bloomington. The Courthouse dome had been illuminated in 1885 with a generator at the Walton Plow Company in the 200 block of West Washington, and Rogers strung a line from that generator to his store.
Reginald C Rogers was the son of a C & A worker who was killed on the job in the 1870's. He remembered seeing the Lincoln funeral train and travelling to Springfield with his father to see Lincoln as he laid in state there. He was born in 1850 and moved to Bloomington when he was just 4 years old. He married Flora L Sackett of Clinton in 1893, but did not enjoy married life for very long. Mrs. Rogers died in 1896.
Mr. Rogers retired from business in 1919 and announced that he would begin travelling. His travelling companions were sometimes Will Shorthose or C E Stewart. He travelled to Mexico, Arkansas and Iowa before he made a 1922 Mediterannean cruise in which he visited such places as Cadiz, Spain and Egypt. In 1923 he went on a round the world trip with Dr and Mrs Vandervoort and C E Stewart.
He died in 1926, shortly after returning from his round the world trip.
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