In the complete medical annals of human stature, across all centuries and continents, only one single human being has ever been verified as standing taller than John William “Bud” Rogan of Sumner County, Tennessee. Born in the final decade of the nineteenth century as the son of a formerly enslaved farmer, Rogan reached an officially measured skeletal height of eight feet nine inches (two hundred and sixty-seven centimeters)—making him the tallest person of African descent in world history and the second tallest human being ever recorded behind only eight-foot-eleven Robert Wadlow.
Early Childhood in Tennessee and the Onset of Ankylosis
John William Rogan was born around February sixteenth, 1868 (with some census records citing 1865 or 1871), in Hendersonville, Sumner County, Tennessee, the fourth of twelve children born to William Rogan, a freedman who had acquired a small farm after the American Civil War. Like almost all individuals who experience extreme pituitary gigantism, “Bud” Rogan was a completely average-sized boy during his early childhood, playing alongside his eleven brothers and sisters in the rolling hills north of Nashville.
Around his thirteenth birthday, however, a benign hormone-secreting tumor on his pituitary gland triggered an explosive, unstoppable surge of vertical growth. As his long bones lengthened rapidly throughout his teens, a debilitating secondary medical complication set in: severe ankylosis, an inflammatory abnormal rigidity and fusion of the bones inside his knee and hip joints, compounded by his body’s inability to support his rapidly elongating skeleton. By the year 1882, while still a teenager, John Rogan lost the ability to stand upright or walk on his feet, yet his bones kept growing year after year even after he entered his twenties and thirties.
The Goat-Pulled Cart at the Gallatin Train Station
Although he could no longer walk and weighed remarkably little for his immense frame—averaging between one hundred and seventy-five and two hundred pounds, which gave him an extraordinarily slender silhouette—Rogan refused to live shut away inside a bedroom or join a traveling sideshow circus that wanted to exploit him across the country. Instead, he engineered his own independent livelihood and mobility right at home in Sumner County.
Building a low wooden flatbed cart fitted with four wheels and harnessing it to a pair of trained billy goats that he steered with leather reins, Rogan drove himself down the country roads to the Louisville and Nashville Railroad depot in Gallatin, Tennessee. Sitting calmly in his goat-cart on the station platform as passenger trains pulled in from across the United States, the gentle, deep-voiced giant greeted travelers with warm humor and sold postcards and hand-drawn portraits of himself to passengers leaning out the train windows, earning a steady, respectable income that helped support his family without ever leaving his hometown.
His 1899 Measurements and the Concrete Grave of 1905
When doctors in Kansas City and Tennessee examined Rogan in 1899, he was measured sitting down at eight feet six inches, and he continued to grow slowly over the final six years of his life. His hands were marvels of human anatomy, measuring eleven and a half inches in length from wrist to fingertip, while his feet measured thirteen and a half inches long. Because of his spinal curvature (kyphoscoliosis) and fused knee joints that prevented him from standing straight against a wall during his final years, his true full-body length was confirmed upon his death in September 1905 at the age of thirty-seven from complications of his condition: measured fully extended, John Rogan stood eight feet nine inches (2.67 meters) tall.
Following his death on September eleventh, 1905, medical schools and anatomical museums from across the country immediately contacted the Rogan family offering large sums of money to purchase and dissect his skeleton, and the family feared that unethical grave robbers might dig up his casket in the night to steal his bones for exhibition. To protect their beloved son and brother in death just as they had in life, the Rogan family buried him in the family yard beneath several tons of solid concrete and rock—ensuring that the second tallest man who ever walked the Earth rested in permanent peace beneath the soil of Tennessee.
