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William Matticks Rogers.
Private 18th Mass. Vols. (Infantry), September, 186; Quartermaster-Sergeant; Sergeant-Major; died at Savage's Station, Va., of disease contracted in the service, June, 1862.William Matticks Rogers was born in Boston October 26, 1838. His father was an Englishman by birth, but at the age of ten years was brought to this country, and is well remembered as in later life the pastor of the Winter Street Church in Boston. His mother's maiden name was Adelia Strong, daughter of the Hon. Solomon Strong of Leominster, and a lineal descendant from Elder John Strong, a stanch and pious Puritan, who came to this country in 1629. The mother died in 1848, and the father in August, 1851; so that William Rogers was left an orphan in early boyhood. Fortunately, however, his father was a man of many friends, and it was in the household of one of these,, the Rev. William A. Stearns, then of Cambridge, that he found a home for the five years following. He went thence, in the autumn of 1854, to the Phillips Academy at Andover, where he was under the care of that able and popular teacher ‘Uncle Sam’ Taylor. There he led a very quiet life; studied well, rose above mediocrity in scholarship, and enjoyed a general popularity among his schoolmates. In 1856 he went from the Academy to Harvard College, and entered as Freshman with the Class of 1860. During the first of his four years course, his life flowed as calmly as an underground stream; his room was at quite a distance from the student quarter of the town, at the house of an old family friend. His habits led him to await friendly advances rather than to make them, and at the end of the second term, few of the Class were less known among its members than he. Still he was not a hermit by nature, but, on the contrary, a man eminently fitted for friendship. And when, in his Sophomore
