Appalachian Figures
When Ohio historians talk about Madam Lizzie Lape, they usually start in Marion or Akron or Stow. They talk about the White Pigeon, about raids on “houses of ill fame,” about an early test of the Winn Law and the Married Women’s Property Acts. Very few start where the paper trail actually begins, in the hill farms of Whitley County, Kentucky, with a girl the census takers called Amy or Elizabeth Rogers.
Thanks to a Revolutionary War pension file, mid-century census pages, later court records in Ohio, and the long work of her great-great-granddaughter Debra L. Lape, we can now follow that girl from the Cumberland foothills into the railroad towns and red light districts of the industrial Midwest. The same primary sources that once hid her under married names and euphemisms now let us see her as both an Appalachian migrant and a businesswoman who used new property laws to keep control of her earnings in an era when most married women could not.
This story begins not in a brothel but in a Whitley County courtroom in 1828, with her grandfather asking for a pension as an aging veteran, and with a Rogers family that was already deeply rooted in the upper Cumberland country before the Civil War ever reached Kentucky.
James Rogers’s pension and a Whitley County foundation
On 7 October 1828, an aging farmer named James Rogers appeared “in open court” in Whitley County and swore out a declaration for a federal Revolutionary War pension. He told the judge he was about sixty eight or sixty nine, lived in the county with his wife, and had once served in the North Carolina line under Captain Griffith McRee and Colonel James Armstrong. He listed one horse, one cow, ten sheep, and little else, explaining that age and a useless left arm kept him from making a living without help.
The court clerk certified that James Rogers was a resident citizen of Whitley County and that his service had been verified to the court’s satisfaction. Later notes in the same file record that his widow Judy applied from Whitley County in 1849, and that a local man, William Eaton, testified she was his sister and that she had always been Rogers’s only wife.
By 1834 the old soldier was part of a small community of pensioners who vouched for one another. In the pension application of John Nix of neighboring Laurel County, a note explains that James Rogers of Whitley County and another veteran, Daniel Twigg, gave affidavits swearing that, as pensioners themselves, they believed Nix had served as he claimed.
When federal officials compiled the special 1840 census of pensioners, “James Rogers, 86” appears under Whitley County, confirming that the veteran had lived there into old age.
Later genealogical work, built on those records and Kentucky land and court material, identifies this Whitley County pensioner as the progenitor of a Rogers line that stretched across Laurel and Whitley Counties. Compiled Rogers family histories and Wikitree entries treat him as the father of Prior (often written “Pryor”) Rogers, who in turn appears in mid-nineteenth century Whitley County census schedules as the head of a farm family.
For Appalachian historians, this matters because it places Madam Lizzie’s people squarely inside the same upper Cumberland world that sent so many migrants north after the Civil War. Her story does not arrive in Ohio out of nowhere. It grows from a Revolutionary War veteran who settled in Whitley County, raised children on a small frontier farm, and depended on his grown children’s charity when his own body gave out.
Prior and Cynthia Rogers in the census record
The federal census schedules for 1850, 1860, and 1870 show a household in or near Williamsburg, Whitley County, headed by Prior or Pryor Rogers, with his wife Cynthia and a growing group of children. Genealogists working from those pages and local marriage records identify Cynthia as Cynthia Whitman and list the couple among the grandchildren of pensioner James Rogers and his wife Judy.
Within that household appears a daughter recorded as Amy E., Elizabeth, or simply “Lizzie,” born in 1853 in Kentucky. The exact spelling shifts with the enumerator and the year, but age, birthplace, and parental names match the later Ohio records for a woman who would call herself Amy Elizabeth Rogers and, eventually, Lizzie Lape.
In these Whitley County entries the Rogers family looks much like its neighbors. Prior is listed as a farmer, his real estate and personal estate values small but not negligible. The household includes older siblings, younger children, and sometimes additional relatives, a pattern that fits what we know about extended family networks in the mountain South. The census does not hint that one of the Rogers daughters will end up owning saloons and boarding houses in half a dozen Ohio towns. It simply pins her in place: a child of a Whitley County farm family in the 1850s.
Later Wikitree profiles for “Amy Elizabeth (Rogers) France” and related Rogers lines pull together those census citations, DNA matches, and Kentucky marriage records to build a composite portrait. They agree on a birth date of 15 August 1853 in Whitley County and on a death sometime after July 1918, with no confirmed grave.
Losing land after the war and leaving the hills
Debra L. Lape, a great-great-granddaughter of Amy Elizabeth Rogers, spent some forty years tracking her ancestor through census returns, court dockets, family letters, and newspaper clippings. Her book, Looking for Lizzie: The True Story of an Ohio Madam, Her Sporting Life and Hidden Legacy, pulls those scattered references into a single narrative and is the core secondary source for everything that follows.
Lape’s research and the Old Pros article based on it agree on several key points. They place Amy Elizabeth’s childhood in Whitley County, Kentucky. They describe how the Rogers family lost property in the economic and legal chaos that followed the Civil War, a fate that struck many small landholders in the upper Cumberland as debts mounted and tax laws shifted. They also note family oral history that remembered Lizzie simply as a woman “from the South” who left home young and later ran a notorious house in Ohio.
Around fourteen, according to family accounts and reconstructed timelines, Amy left Kentucky for Chicago. There she entered sex work in one of the city’s better brothels, part of a much larger migration of young people from Appalachian farms into fast-growing industrial cities in the late nineteenth century. When the Great Chicago Fire of 1871 destroyed whole districts, including the vice districts that had sheltered her, she left the city with a Union veteran named Jeremiah Lape.
The couple married and eventually settled in Plain City, Ohio. In the early 1880s the records show a son, Henry Arville, usually called Arville, and then, almost immediately, a separation. By the end of 1882, census and city directory evidence place Lizzie in Columbus as a boarder near the rail station, while her young son’s care and property would become a recurring legal theme in later years.
From this point forward the Kentucky farm girl largely disappears under new surnames: Lape, Huffman, Larzelere, DeWitt, Veon, Shetler, France. Putting the Whitley County child and the Ohio madam together requires both the genealogical chain from the Rogers pension papers and the continuity of age and birthplace in these later census entries, which consistently list her as a Kentucky-born woman of the right age.
White Pigeon, railroad towns, and a traveling madam
By the mid 1880s Lizzie’s paper trail in Ohio becomes easier to follow because she begins appearing in newspapers and court records. Old Pros summarizes that she rented a saloon in Dayton near the depot, moved on to Lima, and married local saloonkeeper and thief George Hoffman. A raid on Hoffman’s Junction House in 1885 led to stolen property charges and another move.
In Marion, Ohio she acquired what would become her most famous property, a combined saloon and brothel called the White Pigeon, along with an adjacent house that local memory would later call the Red House. Sitting near the rail line, the White Pigeon catered to travelers and locals alike and built a reputation for food, drink, and sex that lasted about twenty years.
Newspaper coverage from the Marion Star in the early twentieth century, cited by both Debra Lape and later writers, hints at how notorious the place became. One article describes the effort to “wipe out of existence” the house long known as the White Pigeon, a sign that reformers saw Lizzie’s establishment as a symbol of vice in the town.
Meanwhile, Lizzie married again and again. Old Pros counts eight husbands over the course of her life, among them Jack Larzelere, Henry and John DeWitt, Charles Veon, William Shetler, and finally John D. France, a farmer. She often chose partners who already had a foothold in the saloon business or local politics, then ended those marriages when they turned violent or when husbands tried to lay claim to her properties.
In later census years she appears not just as a “boarding house keeper” but as the owner of saloons and houses of prostitution in Marion, Akron, Stow, and Shelby. Those enumerations matter because they repeatedly list her age and birthplace as matching the Amy Elizabeth Rogers born in Whitley County, allowing genealogists to track the same woman across multiple counties and surnames.
Lizzie and the law: child support, married women’s property, and the Winn Law
If the census tells us where Lizzie lived, the courts show us how she fought. Debra Lape’s work and the Wikipedia summary drawn from it highlight several legal contests that thrust this Kentucky-born madam into the middle of debates over women’s property rights.
At Akron, Lizzie became one of the rare women sued for child support. In that case her son’s trust included the White Pigeon property and its proceeds, and the trustee was former Akron mayor Lorenzo Dow Watters, who later served as her attorney in other matters. Court filings there and in other Ohio counties show her using the relatively new Married Women’s Property Acts to insist that brothels and saloons purchased in her name belonged to her alone, not to husbands who drank away profits or landed in jail.
In Marion County she became the first brothel owner targeted under the state’s new Winn Law, a statute that restricted liquor sales in houses deemed to be of ill fame. Contemporary newspaper reports, preserved in law summaries and cited in the Wikipedia article, describe her case as an early test of the law’s reach. Lizzie mounted an aggressive legal defense and won, reinforcing the idea that the state could not easily use liquor law as a backdoor way to seize property from women like her.
Across multiple divorces she faced husbands who hoped to claim her buildings and business income. In case after case local judges ended up applying the Married Women’s Property Acts in her favor, leaving the White Pigeon and other holdings in her hands. Old Pros points out that this made her part of the first generation of married women who could keep property after divorce in practice, not just on paper.
Seen from Whitley County, the picture is striking. A granddaughter of a Revolutionary War pensioner who once declared that he relied on his children’s charity becomes, within two generations, a woman who drags mayors, sheriffs, and ex-husbands into court to defend her right to a saloon at the rail line.
“Girl Missing” and “Lizzie Veon is Converted”
Newspapers also give us some of the most vivid glimpses of Lizzie’s world, even when the clippings themselves are scattered and hard to find. A 1901 item in the Richland Shield & Banner of Mansfield, Ohio, titled “Girl Missing,” reported on a missing young woman connected to a house run by “Lizzie Veon,” one of Lizzie’s married names. The piece, cited in modern summaries, simultaneously treated the disappearance as a morality play and used it to remind readers that brothels operated within ordinary neighborhoods.
Two years later, on 5 March 1903, the Mansfield Daily Shield carried a story headlined “Lizzie Veon is Converted.” That article, again preserved in references rather than in full text online, described a very public religious conversion in which Lizzie renounced her former profession. Debra Lape and the Wikipedia entry both note that this is the moment when her “trail runs cold” for many researchers. Once she stepped away from the White Pigeon and similar houses, she dropped out of the vice columns that had once recorded her every raid and arrest.
At roughly the same time, Canton newspapers were carrying coverage of the Winn Law test case that pitted the State of Ohio against her as a property owner and brothel keeper. Chronicling America indexes those headlines, which show Lizzie not as a tragic figure but as a determined litigant fighting to protect her business from a new wave of regulation.
Letters from New Philadelphia and the 1918 flu
For Lizzie’s final years the richest near-primary source is not a court file or census page but a handful of family letters quoted in a 2020 WOSU story, “Letters From Home: Her Great-Great-Grandmother Helps Her Through This Pandemic.” In that piece, Debra L. Lape explains how, in 1917, her great-great-grandmother sold a small farm in Warren Township and moved into town at New Philadelphia, Ohio.
Debra notes that Lizzie disappeared from the record in June 1918 at age sixty four, the same age Debra had reached when she wrote during the COVID-19 pandemic. She points out that the 1918 influenza epidemic was largely absent from the farm community newspapers she had searched, but that it struck New Philadelphia within months of Lizzie’s move. The first local case appeared in the fall of 1918, just three months after Lizzie vanished from the family’s paper trail.
Family letters from around that time, though not reproduced in full, show Lizzie in close contact with relatives, encouraging them and helping care for family members. The WOSU piece emphasizes that for Debra, the lesson of her ancestor’s story is less about scandal than about care and resilience in the face of disease and upheaval. Lizzie’s last known acts were domestic and relational rather than sensational.
No confirmed death record or grave has yet been tied to her. Wikitree and other compilations cautiously list her as dying sometime after July 1918, likely in or near New Philadelphia. In that sense, the Kentucky-born madam remains one more Appalachian migrant whose journey ended in an Ohio town cemetery that has not yet given up her name.
Why her Whitley County story matters
For Whitley Countians and for people who study Appalachian migration, Lizzie’s life offers a remarkable case study in how mountain families became entangled in the social and legal experiments of the Gilded Age and Progressive Era.
Her grandfather James stands in the Whitley County order book and pension rolls as one of the aging Revolutionary War veterans whose stories linked the upper Cumberland back to the founding era. Her parents, Prior and Cynthia, appear in mid-century census pages as small farmers whose fortunes rose and fell with land values and debt in the antebellum and postwar South. Their daughter Amy Elizabeth, recorded in those same pages, left the hills as a teenager and remade herself as Madam Lizzie, a woman who learned to navigate brothel hierarchies in Chicago and then ran her own houses in Ohio.
Along the way she forced Midwestern courts to take seriously the idea that married women could own and defend property, even when that property was a saloon and brothel instead of a respectable boarding house. She collided with reform movements that tried to control vice through liquor regulation and moral panic, yet repeatedly walked out of court still holding her deeds.
For Appalachian history in particular, her story complicates common images of mountain women as either saintly bearers of tradition or passive victims of outside forces. Lizzie Rogers of Whitley County grew up in the same world as many east Kentucky migrants who later turned up in Midwestern mills, factories, and coal camps. She simply chose work that respectable historians ignored for a long time. Thanks to pension files, census schedules, court records, and the stubborn curiosity of descendants, she has become visible again as both a product of the Appalachian uplands and a figure who helped test the boundaries of women’s economic rights far from the hills where she was born.
Sources and further reading
James Rogers pension application, W2168, Southern Campaign American Revolution Pension Statements and Rosters. Transcribed Whitley County court declaration dated 7 October 1828, with later notes on his widow Judy and supporting affidavits. Revolutionary War Applications
John Nix pension application, S30620, Southern Campaign American Revolution Pension Statements, including affidavits by James Rogers and Daniel Twigg of Whitley County confirming Nix’s service. Revolutionary War Applications
Federal 1840 Census of Pensioners for Revolutionary or Military Services, Kentucky section, listing James Rogers, age eighty six, in Whitley County. Census+1
United States federal census schedules for Whitley County, Kentucky, 1850–1870, entries for Prior or Pryor Rogers and wife Cynthia, with daughter Amy Elizabeth or Elizabeth; and later federal census entries in Ohio listing Lizzie under married names such as Lape, Veon, Shetler, and France, consistently reporting a Kentucky birthplace and matching age. These are compiled and cited in Wikitree profiles for Amy Elizabeth (Rogers) France and related descendants. WikiTree+2WikiTree+2
Local court records in Marion, Akron, Canton, Stow, Shelby, and other Ohio jurisdictions documenting divorces, property disputes, child support cases, and the Winn Law prosecution, many of them cited in Debra L. Lape’s book and in modern summaries. Wikipedia+1
Newspaper coverage of Lizzie under the name Lizzie Veon, including “Girl Missing” in the Richland Shield & Banner(Mansfield, Ohio, 25 July 1901) and “Lizzie Veon is Converted” in the Mansfield Daily Shield (5 March 1903), as well as Winn Law test case headlines in Canton newspapers and Marion Star coverage of the White Pigeon. These clippings are cataloged and cited in the Wikipedia biography and in Debra L. Lape’s work. Wikipedia+1
Family letters and photographs from Lizzie’s later years, quoted and described in Clare Roth, “Letters From Home: Her Great-Great-Grandmother Helps Her Through This Pandemic,” WOSU, 24 April 2020. WOSU Public Media
Debra L. Lape, Looking for Lizzie: The True Story of an Ohio Madam, Her Sporting Life and Hidden Legacy (2014). Core biographical and genealogical study by Lizzie’s great-great-granddaughter, based on decades of research in court files, land records, newspapers, and family papers. Amazon+1
Charlene J. Fletcher and Kaytlin Bailey, “Lizzie Lape: The Most Prolific Madam in Ohio,” Old Pros Online, with associated episode of The Oldest Profession Podcast. Narrative overview of Lizzie’s career as a madam, drawing on Lape’s research and highlighting her use of the Married Women’s Property Acts and her multiple moves across Ohio. Old Pros+1
“Lizzie Lape,” Wikipedia entry, summarizing biographical details, Whitley County origins, the role of Revolutionary War veteran James Rogers, and the legal significance of her Akron child support case and the Marion County Winn Law prosecution, with citations to newspapers and local histories. Wikipedia
Wikitree profiles for Amy Elizabeth (Rogers) France (Rogers-15378), James Rogers Sr (Rogers-15381), Judith (Eaton) Rogers, and associated Rogers descendants, which gather census citations, pension references, and DNA matches connecting the Whitley County Rogers family to the Ohio lines of Lizzie’s children and grandchildren. WikiTree+4WikiTree+4WikiTree+4
Jane Ann Turzillo, Wicked Women of Ohio (Arcadia Publishing, 2018), which includes a chapter on Lizzie and helped bring her story to wider popular attention. Old Pros+1