Born September 7, 1885, Richmond, IN; Died October 24, 1967, Gainesville, GA. B.S. Piedmont College (1906); B.S.C.E., Earlham College (1907); M.A. Columbia University (1927); Hon. Ed.D., Piedmont College (1934). Related to both George Rogers and William Clark, Rogers taught at Oakwood Seminary in NY until 1911 when he joined Piedmont College. There he taught and served as Dean until 1934 when he became President of North Georgia College at Dahlonega. Under his stewardship, enrollment at North Georgia rose from 160 to 702, and a school on the brink of closure was saved. He came to UGA as President in January, 1949. After leaving the University in 1950, Rogers directed Tallulah Falls School (1951-1953) and worked at Reinhardt College as a math professor and counselor from 1957 to 1962. He was also a man of deep religious conviction whose service to the Methodist Church spanned nearly half a century. Accomplishments: Rogers served in a time of brief but acute financial austerity which came between the postwar boom and the steadier growth of the later 1950s. In spite of this, he worked with the Board of Regents to centralize the control of the Agricultural Experiment Stations under University control. This clash over jurisdiction of agricultural education would be costly, as it would result in the dismissal of both Rogers and Agriculture School Dean Harry Brown in 1950.
The collection consists of Jonathan Clark Rogers' papers. There are nine boxes of Administrative Subject and Correspondence Files arranged in alphabetical order and embracing chiefly the years of Rogers' Presidential tenancy, though there are records from as early as 1938 and as late as 1955. There is also a document box which houses a scrapbook of appreciation and a second clipping and photo scrapbook encompassing the years 1949-1967. Finally, an 11th box has been appended to the Rogers papers. This box, dealing with the Atlanta Division of the University of Georgia (today, Georgia State University), embraces records from 1947 through 1956, though the heart of the material again locates temporally in the tenure of Rogers as the President of the University of Georgia. This box may house materials of interest to researchers of the presidential tenures of Harmon W. Caldwell and Omer C. Aderhold as well.