Chapter 2
THE ROHRERS
“People who never look backward to their ancestors
will not look forward to posterity."
- Edmund Burke
i - Lorenzo D. Rohrer and Catherine Webster Rohrer
In 1923, Lorenzo Dow Rohrer, my great-grandfather, was described thus:
“
With the exception of integrity, there is, perhaps, no other quality so much in
demand in the business world of today as practicality. Energy, push, enterprise,
courage and rapid and sure decision mark the men who become the important
compelling forces in the upbuilding of the commerce of the country, but all are men of
practical ideas and methods, not visionaries. Thus marked is Lorenzo Dow Rohrer,
president of the L. D. Rohrer Company, manufacturers of flour and dealers in all
kinds of grain and feed, one of Cumberland’s leading and important concerns."1
Even allowing for the hyperbole of the period, my great-grandfather is an ancestor
to brag about. We called him Grandpap.
Lorenzo - who was most likely named for Lorenzo Dow (1777-1834), the
flamboyant Methodist preacher, evangelist, pamphleteer and camp-meeting
exponent - was born near Eakles Mills, about two miles south of Keedysville in
Washington County, Maryland in 1846. He was the ninth of ten children of Jacob and
Rosanna (Kefauver) Rohrer. Jacob's parents had been John Rohrer, who owned a
fulling (textile processing) mill in the same area, and his wife, Eva Bowers.
One historian claims the first in this Rohrer line in America was a Frederick
(Friedrich) Rohrer, who was of German origin but emigrated from France in 1729.2
7
2Thomas J. C. Williams, A History of Washington County, Maryland, Hagerstown, 1906, republished Baltimore
Regional Publishing Co., 1968.
1James W. Thomas and T. J. C. Williams, History of Allegany County, Maryland, Baltimore Regional Publishing
Co., 1968 (originally published 1923). The article may have been prepared well before 1923, for it is believed
that by that year L. D. Rohrer ’s business had failed.
