James Rogers, MA

Mr. Rogers is the Principal of Sacramento City's school, located at 7th and L streets, on the grounds of the Methodist Church.

Born in 1799 in Philadelphia, Mr. Rogers early Yankee upbringing was balanced by his education at St. Swithins' School in his father's native England, where he distinguished himself in the liberal arts and went on to read theology at Oxford. .After receiving his Master of Arts from Christ's College, Cambridge, Mr. Rogers became privy secretary to his grace, the Duke of Cumberland. He returned to the United States in 1830, after an obscure incident involving an affaire d'honneur with an intemperate viscount, and was appointed to the faculty at Princeton University, where he taught philosophy, theology, and Biblical Greek.

The tragic deaths of his wife and children precipitated a personal crisis, and Mr. Rogers no longer could bring himself to teach prospective ministers of a God in which he no longer believed about a faith which he no longer found convincing. Unable to bear to live where everything reminded him of his beloved family, Mr. Rogers absconded to the farthest reaches of the American continent at the behest of a former student, now a minister in Sacramento City.