Rogana

Hugh Rogan was born in 1747 in Glentourn, County Donegal, Ireland. As an adult, he served under the patriot of Gratton, and when his chief's cause failed, he fled to America in 1775 fearing arrest by the British. After a short time in the Philadelphia area, he moved to a settlement on the Yadkin in North Carolina, where he kept a store and practiced weaving. Rogan came to the Cumberland Valley in early 1779 as a guard for the survey team led by D. Thomas Walker and Daniel Smith, who were marking the lines between North Carolina and Virginia. In December 1779 he joined the Donelson flotilla and arrived at the French Lick, present-day Nashville, in April 1780, joining the James Robertson party that had arrived in December to build cabins and clear land for a permanent settlement. In 1784 he sold his land in Nashville in exchange for money and a farm on Bledsoe Creek in Sumner County. He joined the 1787 Coldwater Expedition led by James Robertson to Alabama with other Middle Tennesseans against renegade Cherokees and Creeks who were terrorizing the Cumberland settlements. In 1794 he took part in the attacks on Nickajack and Running Water towns near Lookout Mountain, which substantially ended the Indian wars in Middle Tennessee. In 1796, after Tennessee gained statehood and the Indian wars were over, he returned to Ireland and brought his wife and son to Sumner County, where he had built his two-room stone house, Rogana, on Bledsoe Creek, east of present-day Galatin. For more than 50 years, it served as the Mass Station for Catholics. The house was moved in 1998 to its present location in Bledsoe's Fort Historical Park.

Castalian Springs, Tennessee · United States