Part of the genesis of this entire place names series are the odd names that often show up prominently on Google maps.

Perhaps the most obvious is the giant “Venturetown” that Google sometimes provides, rather than what we almost universally call North Warren.

Rogertown is another one of those.

Take a left onto Route 59 from USU 6 and … Bam. Welcome to Rogertown.

An article on place names in the county published in the 1960s calls it a “cluster of houses in Mead Township just across the Allegheny River at the east end of Warren borough.”

As with many of the names of places in the county, this one is named for an early resident of the area — Alson Rogers.

According to Schenck’s History of Warren County, Rogers was born in 1807 in New York State and orphaned at the age of seven.

His grandparents took him to Vermont where he lived on a farm before moving to Warren in 1830.

Rogers owned a saw mill in the area — his life work was primarily in the timber trade — that had been constructed prior to 1806 but was defunct by 1839.

Rogers was involved in early agricultural society work in Sugar Grove and also one of the commissioners appointed to settle the boundary between Sheffield and Pleasant townships.

He was a business partner with Darius Mead who, ultimately, secured a much more prominent location named after him — Mead Township.

Rogers died in 1876.

“Mr. Rogers was kind and hospitable in his social relations, plain and unassuming in manner, and one of the substantial and useful early settlers of Warren County,” Schenck concluded. “He possessed in a marked degree that untiring perseverance, industry, and economy which deserve and command success ; while his strict integrity, high moral character, and firmness in his convictions of right, won for him the respect and esteem of his fellowmen.