Background
Rogers was born to James and Mary Rogers in Ireland, and they immigrated to the Massachusetts Bay Colony around 1729. Robert Rogers was born in 1731 and a third brother Richard in 1733.
Rogers was born to James and Mary Rogers in Ireland, and they immigrated to the Massachusetts Bay Colony around 1729. Robert Rogers was born in 1731 and a third brother Richard in 1733.
He emigrated to America at an early age and became a frontiersman. He then served as Loyalist leader during the and later settled in Ontario in Canada. He was with Robert in the Battle on Snowshoes in January 1757, the Siege of Louisbourg (1758), the Ile Saint-Jean Campaign and the Battle of the Plains of Abraham (1759).
In 1765, he was granted the township of Kent, a 26,000-acre (110 km2) parcel in Vermont later known as the townships of Londonderry and Windham.
In the, he commanded the 2nd Battalion of the King"s Rangers, thereby forfeiting his lands in Vermont. In 1784, he led a party of about 300 disbanded King"s Rangers and their families to the Third Township of Cataraqui, later known as the Township of Fredericksburgh, in Lennox County, Ontario, where they were granted land.
Rogers, who first settled in Fredericksburgh, where he became lieutenant-colonel of the militia, lived for a time in Prince Edward County, Ontario but returned to Fredericksburgh before his death on September 23, 1790. Between 1780 and 1783, Rogers was heavily involved in the negotiations with Ethan Allen and Thomas Chittenden to have Vermont come back under the British Crown.
Rogers and Allen were both large land owners in Vermont, which had not been admitted to the newly formed United States because both New York and New Hampshire claimed it as their own, and declared independence in 1777.
These negotiations resulted in Allen being accused of treason, but no formal charges were ever made. There was another David Rogers, the first son of then Captain James Rogers, who died at 4 years old in 1766 and is buried in East Derry, New Hampshire.
