Profile · Appleton, Wisconsin
Henry James Rogers ("H.J.")
Appleton mill and Edison-light pioneer; built Hearthstone (not Standard Oil’s Henry Huttleston Rogers)
~$0 at death; peak ~$250,000 (c.1890)
Henry James Rogers—known as H.J.—was the Appleton paper-mill and gas-company executive who organized the Appleton Edison Light Company in 1882 and lit Hearthstone, his house at 625 West Prospect Avenue, from the Fox River. Twenty-six days after Edison’s Pearl Street steam plant in New York, Appleton had hydroelectric light. Rogers ran Appleton Paper and Pulp and Appleton Gas Light. On a fishing trip he heard about Edison from H.E. Jacobs of Western Edison, formed Appleton Edison Light Company on May 25, 1882, ordered two Edison K dynamos, and bolted the first to the same water wheel that beat the pulp. When mill load made the expensive bulbs surge and die, he gave the utility its own wheel and a building on Vulcan Street. On September 30, 1882, Hearthstone, the mills, and then the neighbors had electric light; the Appleton Crescent called it “bright as day.” Architect William Waters designed the house for Cremora, who missed Baltimore—nine fireplaces, gas pipes in the walls as a hedge if Edison proved a fad. Original switches and some wiring remain. The family left for Chicago in 1893 after the Panic. Rogers died in 1896. Hearthstone is the only building left from that first winter of central hydroelectric light, and the IEEE, ASME, and ASCE treat the Vulcan Street plant as the world’s first hydroelectric central station—with Pearl Street’s steam plant as the twenty-six-day asterisk.