Nellie L. Rogers

Born	Billerica, Massachusetts
Died	1949-11-06 Billerica, Massachusetts
Public Weigher
In Office	1912 - 1918 1921 - 1949

Nellie Louise Rogers was born in Billerica on August 29, 1871, according to the Howe School's catalogue of its graduates (her grave record and her age at death point to 1872). She was one of the ten children of Timothy Rogers (1835 to 1906), a laborer, and Mary E. (Rowe) Rogers. The family lived at 382 Boston Road, near the Town Hall, in an Italianate house built about 1872 for Eleanor Richardson Bennett, who rented it to Timothy Rogers and left it to him at her death in 1891. His widow and daughters inherited it, and the house stayed in the Rogers family until 1970.

Nellie graduated from the Howe School with the class of 1888 and went on to Lowell Commercial College. The 1897 catalogue of Howe graduates lists her as a book-keeper, living in Billerica.

Her public work was as one of the town's public weighers, appointed each year by the Board of Selectmen. The Billerica magazine's list of the selectmen's appointments in 1913 names "N. L. Rogers" among ten weighers, alongside F. G. Morey, E. B. Carr and Mrs. Maria Elwood, one of only two women on the list. The town reports carry her as N. L. Rogers through 1917. After a gap of three years she reappears in 1921 as Nellie Rogers and was reappointed every year through 1948, serving over the years with Edward B. Carr, Thomas McClelland, Cecile T. Dutile and others, for more than thirty years in all.

Nellie L. Rogers died in Billerica on November 6, 1949, aged 77, as the town clerk recorded in the deaths for that year. She was buried on November 8 in Saint Patrick Cemetery in Lowell, in a family lot whose stone also bears the name of her sister Catherine ("Kate") Rogers, who had died in 1946.

Nellie L. Rogers

Nellie L. Rogers

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