Ebenezer Rodgers Collection

This collection consists of the handwritten sermons of Ebenezer Rodgers, 1820-1830 and his personal account books.

Ebenezer Rodgers was born in Monmouthshire, England in 1788. He was educated in ministry in England before traveling to America in 1818 on a whaling vessel, reaching New Orleans and traveling up the Mississippi River to Louisville, Kentucky. He organized a church in Shelbyville, Kentucky and was ordained at Chariton, Missouri in 1820. In 1834, with his family, he moved to Upper Alton, Illinois at the request of John M. Peck, the president of Shurtleff College, and became the minister and an early trustee of Shurtleff College. Rodgers also established a stone church built on the east side of College Avenue and Seminary Street where it stood until 1869. He was active in local religious and educational affairs until his dead in 1854.