Carrie Rogers was named Arlington's city marshal in 1914.
Carrie Rogers celebrated her 15th birthday when the first Texas and Pacific train pulled into Arlington on July 19 in 1876. The Civil War had destroyed her family economically. By the time she showed up in Arlington to live with her grandfather, both her mother and father had died.
Undeterred by life's early misfortunes, Carrie became both an entrepreneur and civic superstar, building a hotel and numerous houses, sometimes as many as a dozen a year. This made her Arlington's first major home developer. Exuding energy, she wrote newspaper articles and ramrodded a city Improvement Society that advocated for everything from sidewalks to a new opera house. She used her influence to lead a successful 1902 local prohibition vote. And this was 18 years before the 19th Amendment gave women the vote in 1920.
But most remarkably, when city officials decided that a more motherly approach might be more efficient in dealing with rowdy young men, Rogers was named Arlington's city marshal in 1914. She was the first woman in Texas to hold such a position and for decades the only such woman in the state to be a police chief.
Flamboyant and adventurous, she had the city's first swimming pool constructed and she also build a giant treehouse spreading across several trees at her home, using it to host civic events. By the time she died in 1947, Carrie Rogers was the stuff of which local legends are made.
This article was written by Arlington author and historian O.K. Carter, who serves on the Landmark Preservation Commission.
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