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Edith Nourse Rogers
Edith Nourse Rogers grave, Lowell Cemetery
As Marie points out in her earlier post, today is the 50th anniversary of the death of Edith Nourse Rogers who represented Lowell in Congress from 1925 to 1960. She is buried alongside her husband, John Jacob Rogers, who preceded her in Congress (serving from 1913 until his death in 1925), in the Lowell Cemetery.
Although a Republican, Edith Rogers was an enthusiastic supporter of Franklin Roosevelt’s New Deal programs. During World War Two, she filed legislation that created the Women’s Army Corps (WACs) and was one of the co-authors of the GI Bill.
A participant in today’s Lowell Cemetery tour explained that he was a young man living near the cemetery on the day of Rogers’ funeral. Hundreds of soldiers from Fort Devens attended. Their trucks were all parked atop Fort Hill and the troops lined Knapp Avenue and the cemetery roads from Rogers Street all the way to the grave site.
The UMass Lowell Libraries are developing what the staff has named the Fifth Congressional District Archives, starting with the extraordinary resources of the Paul E. Tsongas Papers and Martin T. Meehan Papers and planning to expand the collection by acquiring papers from recent past U.S. Representatives such as Jim Shannon and Chet Atkins and linking via the web to existing collections of people llike Mrs. Rogers, whose papers are at Radcliffe, I believe, and F. Bradford Morse, whose papers are at Boston University. The archive, which will include older historical materials now in the collection of the UMass Lowell Center for Lowell History, will be a unique record of public service, public policy, and politics that will be availalbe to scholars, students, and the interested public. I believe it has the potential of yielding countless research articles and books because of the special role Lowell and the region holds in the history of our nation. Much progress has been made on digitizing the Tsongas Papers (U.S. House and Senate career, 1991-92 presidential campaign, and personal documents) and organizing the more recently obtained Meehan Papers (U.S. House career, various campaigns, and personal documents)—eventually all the material will be digitized and easily accessible to researchers.
President Franklin Roosevelt signed the bill for the Women Army Corps on 1 July 1943. Looking at my aunt’s military service she was a member of the WAC on 6 August 1943. If that is the case she was one of the 1st WAC from Lowell. She was stationed in state of Georgia.