An American Naval Dynasty
The Rodgers Family, Mare Island, and the Making of U.S. Sea Power
Book a Mare Island Historic Park Foundation tour of the oldest naval chapel in the nation and you will be treated to many stained glass windows and historical plaques commemorating our great Navy. One of those windows is a Tiffany stained glass window that features Sir Galahad — known as the son of Sir Lancelot and the finder of the Holy Grail. This window is dedicated to Rear Admiral John Rodgers: Civil War hero, Mare Island Commandant, and proud member of the U.S. Navy’s Rodgers Dynasty.
Another window — the middle panel of a triptych — features the famous biblical scene of Simon kneeling before Jesus following the miracle of the Sea of Galilee, and is dedicated to Admiral David Farragut. Farragut was not only a Civil War hero of the first order, but the very first Commandant of Mare Island Naval Shipyard. The connection between these two men runs far deeper than memorials of glass.
Rear Admiral John Rodgers’ father, Commodore John Rodgers, was one of the founding architects of the professional United States Navy. His service stretched back to the Quasi-War with France in 1798 and the Barbary Wars against the Tripoli pirates. He and his descendants were instrumental in shaping the culture, customs, and standards of the Navy during its most formative years — a culture that, by a twist of institutional fate, nearly ended Admiral Farragut’s career before he had turned twenty.
This is the story of that dynasty: how it was built across five generations, from the age of sail to the age of flight and the deep sea — and how its legacy is permanently woven into the history of Mare Island.
I. The Patriarch: Commodore John Rodgers and the Birth of a Professional Navy (1772–1838)
The Rodgers naval dynasty began with a Maryland farm boy who first went to sea at fourteen, apprenticed to a Baltimore ship captain, and spent the next decade mastering the ocean as a merchant sailor. When the young republic stood up its new Navy in the late 1790s, it was fortunate to attract men like John Rodgers — already one of the most experienced mariners on the Atlantic seaboard.
Rodgers served through the Quasi-War with France beginning in 1798 and both Barbary Wars in North Africa, accumulating a reputation for aggression, professionalism, and an uncompromising standard of seamanship. His philosophy was direct:
“We are now a nation and should calculate on defending ourselves.”
In an era when many politicians preferred Jefferson’s inexpensive coastal gunboats to ocean-going frigates, Rodgers was an early and forceful advocate for a capable, globally-reaching naval force. When war with Britain came in June 1812, he was ready. Commanding the 44-gun frigate USS President, he fired what many historians regard as one of the opening American shots of the War of 1812, then launched an aggressive Atlantic cruise that disrupted British commerce and announced that the young American Navy intended to fight offensively on the open ocean.
His was not a war of individual glamour — it was a war of strategic vision. His contribution was larger and less easily romanticized: he pushed the Navy to take the fight to the enemy, to prove that American naval professionalism could hold its own against the greatest sea power on earth. After the war, Rodgers served three separate terms as President of the Navy’s Board of Commissioners — the service’s senior administrative body — shaping the officer culture, traditions, and professional identity of the Navy during its most consequential decades of institutional development.
He left behind a Navy that looked and thought like the one he had spent forty years building. He also left behind a son, a nephew, and a network of influence that shaped the careers of officers for generations — including, in one notable instance, nearly derailing the career of a young midshipman who would one day become among the greatest naval heroes in American history.
II. Fire, Defeat, and the Making of an Admiral: Farragut at Valparaiso
To understand why Farragut became the officer he did — and why his career nearly ended before it truly began — you must first understand what happened to him in a Chilean harbor when he was thirteen years old.
David Farragut had entered the Navy as a nine-year-old midshipman in 1810, placed under the care of Captain David Porter, the brilliant and volatile officer who became his adoptive father. When Porter took command of the frigate USS Essex at the outbreak of the War of 1812, Farragut went with him. The Essex’s Pacific cruise was one of the most audacious operations of the war: rounding Cape Horn — the first American warship ever to do so — Porter ravaged British whaling commerce across the Pacific, capturing twelve prizes and doing millions of dollars of damage to British trade. Along the way, the twelve-year-old Farragut was given command of one of those prizes, the Alexander Barclay, and sailed her into port. It was, he later wrote, an event that made him feel “no little pride.”
By early 1814, the British had dispatched HMS Phoebe and HMS Cherub to find and destroy the Essex. They blockaded her in the neutral harbor of Valparaiso, Chile. On March 28, Porter, fearing the arrival of additional British ships and hungry — by his own admission — for the glory of a fight, decided to run past the blockaders and escape to open sea. A squall struck near the harbor mouth, carrying away the Essex’s main topmast and leaving her crippled and unmaneuverable. Porter anchored, and the British attacked.
The battle lasted two and a half hours and was the bloodiest engagement involving a single American ship that Farragut would ever witness. Of the Essex’s 255 men, 58 were killed or mortally wounded, 39 severely wounded, and 27 more slightly wounded. Both Porter and the thirteen-year-old Farragut were injured but refused to leave their posts; Farragut lost his coattails to a projectile while trying to protect the quartermaster. When the last guns fell silent, Porter struck the colors. The Essex was lost. Farragut was a prisoner of war at thirteen.
The experience left several permanent marks. The most obvious was tactical: Farragut spent decades studying what had gone wrong. He later criticized Porter’s decision to accept battle in harbor with a crippled ship against an enemy armed with superior long-range guns — the Essex’s short-range carronades were useless at the distance the British chose to fight. But he never condemned the underlying aggressive instinct, only its misapplication. The lesson he drew was not “don’t fight” but “don’t let the enemy choose the terms.”
That lesson would echo forty years later at Mobile Bay, where Farragut drove his fleet through a minefield rather than give a fortified enemy the chance to dictate the engagement on its own terms. “Damn the torpedoes, full speed ahead” was not a spontaneous cry — it was the distilled conclusion of a lifetime’s reflection on what had happened to the Essex in Valparaiso harbor.
The second mark was political. Porter’s subsequent career grew increasingly controversial. In 1825 he was court-martialed for landing troops on Spanish soil in Puerto Rico without authorization — a characteristically impulsive act that ended his naval career and forced him to resign his commission. As Porter’s patron and adoptive father, Farragut bore the political stain of that association. He had no family name of his own to shield him, no hereditary connections to the officer class that controlled promotion. He was the foster son of a disgraced officer, and in the small world of the early Navy, that mattered enormously.
The Naval Clique and the Price of Being an Outsider
By the 1820s, the Rodgers and Perry families had become so deeply intertwined that they constituted something approaching a hereditary officer class within the Navy. Commodore Rodgers’ brother, Captain George Washington Rodgers, had married Anna Maria Perry, sister of both Oliver Hazard Perry and Matthew Calbraith Perry. Historian Samuel Eliot Morison estimated that by the late nineteenth century, roughly forty percent of American naval officers were Rodgers-Perry relatives of one kind or another. The dynasty was not merely prominent — it was structurally embedded in the institution, its members sitting on examining boards, commanding squadrons, and shaping the careers of officers who passed through their orbit.
Into this world stepped David Farragut in 1821. He was nineteen years old, presenting himself for his lieutenant’s examination at essentially the earliest eligible age — and yet his service record already dwarfed most of his contemporaries. He had gone to sea at nine, commanded a prize vessel at twelve, fought under fire at Valparaiso at thirteen, and had accumulated more than a decade of sea service in multiple theaters and languages. On paper, he was arguably the most qualified midshipman of his generation.
The examining board failed him anyway. No official reason was recorded. The examination was entirely oral, with no standardized questions and no appeal beyond the Secretary of the Navy. Three senior captains, their decisions unreviewable and unexplained, held a midshipman’s career in their hands. Farragut was the foster son of Captain David Porter — a brilliant but increasingly controversial officer who had accumulated significant enemies, including among the Rodgers circle. He had no family name, no hereditary connections, no patron more powerful than the divisive Porter. He was, in blunt terms, not one of them.
The Secretary of the Navy, recognizing that no official cause had been given, allowed Farragut to appear before the next board. In October 1821, he passed. He received his full lieutenant’s commission in 1825. The obstacle had been temporary — a speed bump rather than a wall — but the experience was not forgotten. The family network that briefly blocked his advancement was the same one whose decades of institutional labor had built the professional Navy from which Farragut would ultimately rise to become its greatest combat hero.
The irony runs deep: the Rodgers dynasty that once used its influence to slow a young outsider’s promotion later had its warships repaired at the yard that same outsider had built.
III. The Dynasty Expands: From Sail to Steam, Atlantic to Pacific
Rear Admiral John Rodgers (1812–1882): Civil War Ironclad Commander and Mare Island Commandant
Rear Admiral John Rodgers entered the Navy as a midshipman at sixteen — the profession was already his birthright. He spent the next six decades at the cutting edge of American naval history, living through the most dramatic technological transformation the service had ever seen: the shift from sail to steam, from wood to iron, from smoothbore cannon to rifled guns. He adapted to every change, and he flourished.
During the Civil War, Rodgers established himself as one of the Navy’s finest officers commanding ironclads on the western rivers and in coastal operations. While he was fighting in iron-hulled gunboats, his contemporary Farragut — who had left his commandant’s post at Mare Island in 1858 and returned east — was leading the Union Navy’s most dramatic operations. Farragut captured New Orleans in April 1862, besieged Vicksburg, and at the Battle of Mobile Bay in August 1864 issued the most quoted command in American naval history. He became the Navy’s first rear admiral, its first vice admiral, and its first full admiral. The institution that Commodore Rodgers had spent forty years building had produced, in Farragut, its greatest combat legend.
It is worth noting that alongside Farragut at New Orleans in 1862, commanding the mortar flotilla that bombarded the Confederate forts before Farragut drove his fleet past them, was David Dixon Porter — the biological son of Captain David Porter of the Essex, and therefore Farragut’s own foster brother. The boy who had stood beside his father on the bloodied deck of the Essex at Valparaiso had grown into a future admiral who ran the Mississippi. The son of the officer who had failed him had become the subordinate who helped him win his greatest early victory. It was that kind of Navy.
After the Civil War, in 1869, John Rodgers was elevated to Rear Admiral and given command of the Asiatic Squadron. In 1871 he commanded the Shinmiyangyo — the first significant American military expedition into Korea. When Korean shore batteries attacked American vessels attempting to establish diplomatic contact near the Han River, Rodgers responded by landing sailors and Marines to assault the fortified positions on Ganghwa Island. In brutal close-quarters fighting, American forces stormed the Korean forts against determined resistance. Eight Medals of Honor were awarded for the action — among the highest per-capita decorations in any American military engagement. John Rodgers had demonstrated that American naval power could reach anywhere.
In 1873, fresh from the Asiatic Squadron, Rear Admiral John Rodgers arrived at Mare Island Navy Yard as its Commandant.
He was not the first great naval officer to stand on that ground. That distinction belonged to David Farragut, who nineteen years earlier had arrived at a barren tidal peninsula — containing little more than a house and a few ramshackle buildings — and built the Navy’s first Pacific base from scratch. Commissioned on September 16, 1854, Mare Island was Farragut’s creation in the most literal sense. He selected the site, oversaw construction of the dry docks and facilities, and served as its first Commandant until 1858.
On October 3, 1854, Farragut personally oversaw the installation of a large wooden ship’s mast as a flagpole on the south side of the shipyard’s main administration building. It was among the very first acts of permanence at the new yard — a statement driven into the ground before most of the facilities had been built: that this place was official, that this ground belonged to the United States Navy, and that the flag would fly here. The mast was not a decoration. It was a declaration. Everything that followed at Mare Island followed from Farragut, and from that flag.
When Rodgers took command in 1873, he brought something Farragut had not possessed when he founded the yard: direct strategic experience of the Pacific world. He had commanded the Asiatic Squadron. He had fought on Korean shores. He knew, with the confidence of hard-won experience, that America’s naval future lay west of California. Mare Island, positioned at the gateway to the Pacific, was not a regional backwater — it was a strategic anchor for everything the Navy would need to do in the coming century. Under his command, the yard expanded its dry dock capacity, deepened its industrial capabilities for the new age of steam-powered warships, and grew into the indispensable repair and supply base for Pacific operations.
Farragut had built the physical institution. Rodgers arrived with the strategic vision that gave it its Pacific purpose. Together, their legacies define what Mare Island was and what it ultimately became: a place where the age of sail gave way to the age of steam, and where the Navy’s Pacific identity was forged.
Rear Admiral Christopher Raymond Perry Rodgers (1819–1892): Founder of the Naval Institute
Among the most consequential of the wider dynasty was Rear Admiral Christopher Raymond Perry Rodgers, nephew of the Commodore. His very name announced the family’s reach: his mother, Anna Maria Perry, was the sister of both Oliver Hazard Perry and Matthew Calbraith Perry, making him the nephew not only of the Commodore but of two of the most famous naval officers in American history.
Where the main line of the dynasty was distinguished by combat leadership and strategic command, Christopher Raymond Perry Rodgers represented its intellectual dimension. He became Superintendent of the Naval Academy and — more enduringly — the founder and first president of the United States Naval Institute. The Naval Institute, through its journal Proceedings, created a professional forum for naval thought, debate, and doctrine that remains one of the Navy’s premier intellectual institutions to this day.
That a man from the very family network that had once used its institutional influence to delay Farragut’s promotion would go on to found the organization most dedicated to professional naval merit is one of history’s more instructive ironies.
Vice Admiral William Ledyard Rodgers: The Dynasty Matures
The Commodore’s grandson, Vice Admiral William Ledyard Rodgers, carried the family tradition into the early twentieth century, rising to one of the senior ranks of the service and extending the dynasty’s unbroken record of distinguished naval leadership from the age of sail well into the era of modern steel warships. Across nearly 130 years of continuous service, the Rodgers family had produced admirals who fought in every major American conflict from the Quasi-War to the First World War.
IV. Commander John Rodgers — Submariner, Aviator, Pacific Pioneer (1881–1926)
The last — and in some ways most remarkable — of the nationally famous Rodgers officers was Commander John Rodgers (1881–1926), great-grandson of the War of 1812 Commodore. He entered the Naval Academy in 1903, and his career would ultimately span two of the Navy’s most revolutionary technologies: the submarine and the airplane.
Commander, Submarine Force Atlantic Fleet, 1916–1918
Before John Rodgers became famous as a pioneer of naval aviation, he served at the forefront of undersea warfare. Assigned to USS Fulton, the Navy’s submarine tender and training ship, he rose to command the Submarine Force, Atlantic Fleet during the critical years of 1916 to 1918. In that role he commanded the submarine base at New London, Connecticut — which would become, and remains today, the center of American submarine operations and training.
This chapter of Rodgers’ career is often overshadowed by his later aviation exploits, but it deserves to be seen for what it was: another Rodgers family member standing at the technological frontier of naval warfare. The Commodore had mastered the wooden frigate. His son had commanded the ironclad. Now the great-grandson was leading the Navy’s earliest submarine force — the craft that would, over the following decades, become among the most powerful weapons in the American arsenal. The Navy yard at Mare Island would eventually build seventeen nuclear submarines, forming one-fifth of America’s undersea deterrent. The Rodgers family had helped shape the very force that would one day require them.
From the submarine service, Rodgers moved on to an even newer technology. He received his pilot’s license in 1911, becoming the second American naval officer ever to qualify as a pilot — Naval Aviator No. 2.
The First Flight to Hawaii: Nine Days Adrift in the Pacific
By the mid-1920s, the future of naval aviation hung in genuine political uncertainty. Army Air Service Colonel William “Billy” Mitchell was waging a very public campaign to strip the Navy and Army of their separate air arms and fold all American military aviation into an independent force under Army control. The Navy’s chief defender was Rear Admiral William Moffett, head of the Bureau of Aeronautics. What was needed was a demonstration — something dramatic that would prove sea-based aviation could project power across the vast distances of the Pacific. Commander John Rodgers was given the mission.
On August 31, 1925, two Naval Aircraft Factory PN-9 flying boats lifted off from the waters of San Pablo Bay, which washed the western shore of Mare Island — the same quiet waters where Rear Admiral John Rodgers had once surveyed his Pacific command, and where Mare Island’s shipwrights had built and repaired the vessels of the Pacific Fleet. Their destination was Honolulu: 2,400 miles of open ocean, no landmarks, no emergency fields, no margin for navigational error. Ten Navy destroyers were positioned at 200-mile intervals along the route. Tens of thousands of spectators lined the shore to watch the departure.
The flight began well. The second aircraft developed engine trouble and was forced down roughly 400 miles out. Rodgers flew on alone. Through the night and into September 1, PN-9 No. 1 maintained its heading westward. Then, approximately 220 miles short of Honolulu, the fuel ran out. The engines went quiet. Rodgers brought the big flying boat down onto the open Pacific.
What followed was one of the most remarkable feats of improvised seamanship in American aviation history. The radio transmitter — powered by a wind-driven generator — was useless on the water. The receiving set, however, continued to function. Rodgers and his four-man crew could hear every word of the massive search effort being mounted on their behalf. They could do nothing to help.
The morning after the forced landing, the crew stripped the canvas from the lower wing entirely. Lieutenant Connell fashioned the metal floorboards from the cockpit into leeboards — improvised centerboards that reduced sideways drift. The wing fabric became sails. A 14-ton aircraft designed to fly at 85 miles per hour became a sailing vessel, making perhaps three knots through open Pacific swells, guided by a commander who navigated by stars and compass with the same confidence his great-great-grandfather had shown on the Atlantic a century before.
By September 7 — six days after the ditching — the head of rescue operations told the press flatly: “We have virtually given up hope of rescuing the crew.” Rodgers and his men had no intention of waiting to be written off. They sailed. For nine days they sailed, covering approximately 450 miles under improvised canvas across the open Pacific. Fresh water was distilled from seawater using a small still Rodgers’ mother had given him before the flight. Emergency rations ran thin and then out. Sharks remained constant companions.
On September 10, the submarine USS R-4, on routine patrol off Kauai’s eastern coast, spotted them. The crew was so intent on signaling toward the island that they almost failed to see the submarine approaching from the other direction. R-4 came alongside, took the crew aboard, and towed the battered flying boat into harbor.
They had been at sea for nine days. The combined distance — roughly 2,400 miles from San Pablo Bay to Kauai, including 450 miles under sail — constituted a new world record for nonstop distance by a seaplane. The flight that had been declared a failure and its crew given up for lost had, by any reasonable measure, succeeded: it had crossed the Pacific. And in doing so, it had made the political case that preserved the Navy’s independent air arm for the wars still to come.
The Territory of Hawaii honored the achievement with the most direct tribute available. On March 21, 1927, it dedicated its first commercial airport and named it John Rodgers Field. The airport that bears his name — today Honolulu International Airport — handles tens of millions of passengers annually, carrying on the Pacific connection that the great-grandson of the Commodore helped establish at the cost of nine days adrift in the open ocean.
Commander John Rodgers did not live to see the dedication. On August 27, 1926, his aircraft spun into the Delaware River on approach to the Naval Aircraft Factory in Philadelphia. Lieutenant Connell — his crewmate from the Pacific, the man who had rigged the sails from the wing fabric — was waiting at the field and pulled Rodgers from the wreckage. It was too late. Commander John Rodgers, Naval Aviator No. 2, great-grandson of the Commodore who had helped found the professional Navy, died on September 6, 1926. He was forty-four years old.
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V. Mare Island: Where the Dynasty’s Legacy Lives
There is a geographic symmetry at the heart of this story that is worth pausing on. The PN-9 No. 1 lifted off from the waters of San Pablo Bay — the same bay that Rear Admiral John Rodgers had once surveyed as Pacific Fleet commander, the same waters Mare Island’s shipwrights had worked beside for decades. The USS John Rodgers (DD-574) returned to Mare Island in October 1944 for overhaul before rejoining Admiral Spruance’s Task Force 58 for the final campaigns against Japan. Submarines built at Mare Island formed one-fifth of America’s nuclear deterrent — a force shaped in part by the early submarine leadership of Commander John Rodgers himself.
The connection between the Rodgers dynasty and Mare Island is not coincidental. It is structural. Farragut built the yard — that is the irreducible fact from which everything else follows. He arrived at a bare peninsula in 1854 with orders to establish the Navy’s first Pacific installation, and he built it from the ground up. He laid out the dry docks, raised the buildings, and commissioned the yard on September 16, 1854. When he left in 1858, he left behind a functioning institution.
When Rear Admiral John Rodgers took command at Mare Island in 1873, he arrived with something Farragut had not possessed when he founded the yard: direct strategic experience of the Pacific world. He had commanded the Asiatic Squadron. He had fought on Korean shores. He understood, with the confidence of hard experience, that America’s naval future lay west of California, and that Mare Island was its anchor. Under his command, the yard expanded its capacity and grew into the indispensable base for Pacific operations.
Both men went to sea as boys in the age of wooden frigates. Both served in the War of 1812 — one as its senior squadron commander, the other as its youngest midshipman. Both adapted as the Navy transformed from sail to steam, from wood to iron. Both led American naval forces into waters where the flag had never flown before. Different wars, different oceans, the same instinct: move forward, take the fight to the enemy, and trust the Navy you have helped to build.
In this sense, the two windows in the Mare Island chapel — the Tiffany glass for Rear Admiral John Rodgers and the Simon-kneeling-before-Jesus triptych panel for Admiral Farragut — are not merely tributes to individual men. They are emblems of the two traditions that converged at this place: the dynasty that built the institution, and the outsider who built the yard. The family whose influence once briefly delayed a young midshipman’s career, and the midshipman who overcame that delay to become one of the Navy’s greatest heroes. The parallel is not one of rivalry. It is one of complementary greatness.
The Flagpole in Alden Park: A Declaration in Wood
It is worth pausing at length on what the flagpole in Alden Park erected by Admiral Farragut represented — and what its absence means today.
Following Farragut’s arrival on the barren island a matter of the highest priority was to erect a flagpole marking the Navy’s arrival on the West Coast of the United States. Two and a half weeks after his arrival and with less than a dozen employees under his command he personally oversaw the installation of a large wooden ship’s mast as a flagpole on the south side of the shipyard’s main administration building. It was among the very first acts of permanence at the new yard — a statement, driven into the ground before most of the facilities had been built, that this place was official, that this ground belonged to the United States Navy, and that the flag would fly here. The mast was not a decoration. It was a declaration.
A flagpole stood in that spot for 167 years (likely replaced or repaired over time). It stood through the Civil War, the Spanish-American War, two World Wars, and the Cold War. It stood through the commissioning of wooden ships and iron ships and steel ships and nuclear submarines. Rear Admiral John Rodgers walked past it when he arrived as commandant in 1873. Every commandant before and after him for the next century walked past it. The workers who built the seventeen nuclear submarines that formed one-fifth of America’s undersea deterrent walked past it on their way to the dry docks each morning. It was, in the most literal sense, the oldest continuously standing artifact of the entire Mare Island story — older than the dry docks, older than the chapel, older than everything except the ground itself.
In November 2021, structural deterioration forced its removal. The City of Vallejo took the mast down and placed it in a warehouse on the island for assessment and safekeeping. The city stated its intention to work with an architectural historian to find the most appropriate options for restoration and reinstallation. A condition assessment and paint analysis was subsequently commissioned from EverGreene, a respected historic preservation firm, working alongside structural engineers from the Silman Company — a serious, professional undertaking that reflects the flagpole’s recognized status as a protected cultural resource. The mast is formally designated as part of a site listed on both the National Register of Historic Places and the California Register of Historic Resources, both designations conferred in 1975. The City of Vallejo has also designated the area a local Historic District.
All of this is to say: the flagpole is not lost. It is not demolished. It is waiting.
And it should not wait much longer.
The restoration and re-erection of the Alden Park flagpole is not a sentimental gesture. It is an act of historical integrity that the site demands. Alden Park is the historic core of Mare Island — the place where the park’s original layout was conceived by Navy civil engineer W.P. Sanger in 1854, where the Victorian bandstand stands, where the Polaris missile and the SUBROC recall the yard’s nuclear legacy, where the granite obelisk recounts the yard’s milestones, and where Commodore Alden’s exotic trees — brought back by Navy ships from around the world — have shaded the ground for more than 150 years. In this landscape of layered history, the flagpole is the anchor. It is the oldest element, the one installed first, the one that connects every era that followed to the single act of founding that made everything else possible.
Without the flagpole, the park’s historic core is incomplete in a way that no other artifact can compensate for. The Polaris missile is magnificent. The bandstand is irreplaceable. But they were added to a landscape that already had a centerpiece. Farragut put it there. His act of planting that mast was, in miniature, the same act as the one that defines his career: he arrived somewhere that was empty, assessed what was needed, and built it. The flagpole was the first thing Mare Island had. It should not be the last thing Mare Island loses.
The case for restoration is strong on every dimension — historical, legal, civic, and symbolic. The mast is a protected cultural resource under federal and state law. The city has the assessed condition data from EverGreene and Silman. The path to restoration is defined. What is needed is the will and the resources to complete it. When Admiral David Farragut arrived on the barren island erecting the flagpole was a priority and despite the fact that he had only hired 12 workmen, the flagpole was erected and the stars and stripes were flying from the masthead within 2 ½ weeks.
For the families of the men and women who built ships at Mare Island, for the sailors who served on those ships, for the community that grew up in the shadow of the yard’s work, and for the broader American public whose security those ships protected across 142 years, the flagpole’s return to its place in Alden Park is a matter of respect. Rear Admiral John Rodgers walked past it. The destroyers bearing his family’s name were serviced within sight of it. Commander John Rodgers’ PN-9 flew over the bay that it overlooked on its way to the open Pacific. The destroyer named for his family came back to these waters in 1944. The same family whose influence once briefly delayed a young midshipman named Farragut ultimately had its warships repaired at the yard that same midshipman had built.
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Epilogue: One Family, Five Generations, One Navy
The Rodgers dynasty is one of the most remarkable stories in American military history precisely because it was never simply about one person or one era. It was about continuity — a family that showed up, generation after generation, at the moments when the Navy needed leadership most.
Commodore John Rodgers built the Navy’s professional identity out of almost nothing, fighting the Royal Navy when most politicians doubted it was worth the effort. His son took the fight to Korea and helped open the Pacific to American power, then came to Mare Island and gave it strategic purpose. His nephew founded the institution that gives the Navy its intellectual life. His great-grandson commanded the Atlantic submarine fleet during the First World War, then flew the first leg of the Pacific air bridge, sailing a downed flying boat 450 miles across open ocean when the engines failed and the world had given him up for dead — and in doing so helped preserve the Navy’s right to its own air arm for the wars still to come.
The family had traveled, in five generations, from wooden frigates off the Barbary Coast to the cockpits of aircraft above the open Pacific and the conning towers of submarines beneath it. Through every transformation of naval warfare, a Rodgers had been present at the frontier.
And running alongside every chapter of that story was a parallel one: David Farragut, the Tennessee-born outsider who went to sea at nine, survived the destruction of the Essex at thirteen, was denied his promotion by a clique that didn’t consider him one of their own, and spent four decades in professional obscurity before the Civil War gave him the stage his abilities had always deserved. He fought his way up the Mississippi and through Mobile Bay. He built — with his own hands and his own orders — the yard on the Napa River that anchored everything the Rodgers family would later accomplish in the Pacific. And he planted a flagpole in Alden Park that stood for 167 years as the oldest artifact of everything Mare Island ever was or ever became.
The two legacies are not rivals. They are the twin pillars on which Mare Island’s history rests.
From the age of sail to the age of flight and the deep sea. From the Atlantic to the Pacific. From wooden frigates to nuclear submarines. The Rodgers family helped make the U.S. Navy what it is. Farragut gave it its Pacific home. And Mare Island — first naval yard on the Pacific Coast, for 142 years the western anchor of American sea power — is the place where both legacies were made real.
Sources: Rodgers Family Collection, Navy Department Library; Naval History and Heritage Command; U.S. Naval Institute Proceedings; “Tradition Is Their Middle Name,” Naval History Magazine, October 1998; “Ten Days Lost at Sea,” Naval History Magazine, February 2019; “Nonstop to Hawaii By Air and Sea,” HistoryNet; “Fearless Farragut,” HistoryNet; NHHC, Successful Failure?; Hawaii Aviation: John Rodgers Pioneer Pages; Smithsonian Time and Navigation, PN-9 documentation; Mare Island Historic Park Foundation records; National Archives Record Groups 19 and 38.
Dennis Kelly
