John Rogan: The Tallest Man Nobody Talks About
- May 17
- 10 min read
Updated: 6 days ago
In a small Tennessee town in the late 1800s, a man moved through the streets on a cart pulled by goats. He was the son of formerly enslaved parents, he'd never gone near a sideshow, and he was, by the time he died in 1905, almost certainly the tallest human being alive on Earth. His name was John William Rogan. Most people haven't heard of him. That's a shame, because his story is extraordinary.
Quick Answers
How tall was John Rogan? Around 8 feet 9 inches, making him the second-tallest verified person in recorded history, behind only Robert Wadlow.
What caused his height? Gigantism from a pituitary condition, which also caused ankylosis, a fusion of his joints that left him unable to walk by his mid-teens.
Did he join a sideshow? No. He turned down every offer from showmen and museum managers, choosing instead to work as a porter at the Gallatin train station.
Why was he buried in concrete? His family sealed his grave in concrete to stop doctors, anatomists or grave robbers from digging up his body to study or display.
Born Into a Complicated World
John William Rogan was born on 12 February 1867 in Sumner County, Tennessee, the fourth of twelve children raised by William and Truelove Rogan. Both his parents had been enslaved before the Civil War, on a plantation originally built by an Irish immigrant named Hugh Rogan, who'd settled the land in the late 1790s. That's where the family surname comes from: after emancipation, the roughly seventy formerly enslaved people connected to the old Rogan plantation largely kept the name, whether or not they were biologically related to one another. Rather than scattering, many of them stayed rooted around Gallatin and Hendersonville, in what's now the outer suburbs of Nashville, building their own farms, their own churches and their own community.
His mother Truelove was disabled herself, having lost the use of her legs in childhood after complications from tuberculosis. His father William worked the land the family had built for themselves. They weren't wealthy, but they were established and they were rooted, and that mattered enormously once John's body began to change.
For his first twelve or thirteen years, John was unremarkable in terms of size. By his own account, he was slightly larger than average but nothing that drew attention. Then, around the age of 13, everything changed.
The Body That Wouldn't Stop Growing
The change came on fast and it was brutal. John started experiencing unbearable pain in his joints, accompanied by severe migraines. The pain became so extreme that he was bed-bound for roughly two years. During this period of confinement, he could feel himself growing, particularly the elongation of his limbs and the rapid increase in the size of his hands and feet.
The condition was gigantism, caused by the overproduction of growth hormone, typically resulting from a benign tumour on the pituitary gland. In John's case, it triggered something additional: ankylosis, an abnormal fusion of the skeletal joints that progressively destroyed his ability to walk. His bones grew, but his muscles couldn't keep up. By his mid-teens, he could no longer support his own weight.
He tried walking with sticks for a time, but that became too painful and unstable as he continued to grow. Rather than rely on others to carry him, John did something that speaks to a kind of fierce self-determination: he built himself a cart from his own bed, fitted it with a small luggage rack, and trained goats to pull it. This became his vehicle for the rest of his life, and if you search for photographs of him, you'll find images of a towering figure seated in that cart, the goats small and ordinary beside him, the whole scene almost dreamlike in its incongruity.
He never stopped growing. His exact measurements shifted over time, but by 1899, when he was in his late twenties, a medical student named William Lackey persuaded him to submit to a formal examination. Lackey calculated John's height at 8 feet 6 inches while seated, and that figure was independently verified by Dr Duncan Eve of Vanderbilt University in Nashville. By the time of his death in 1905, Lackey estimated John had reached 8 feet 9 inches, though the final measurement was never taken with him standing, because he hadn't been able to stand for years.
Life in Gallatin
John became a familiar figure in Gallatin, Tennessee, where the train station served as a kind of informal workplace. Because he couldn't do physical farm labour, he adapted and found his own way to contribute. He fitted his goat cart with a small luggage rack and took on the role of a novelty porter, meeting incoming trains and carrying bags and packages to nearby hotels. It wasn't glamorous work, but it was dignified, and it was his.
One persistent story about him, that he made his living selling drawings and self-portraits, turns out to be largely a myth. The source of the confusion is an 1897 article in the Kansas City Journal that was actually describing a travelling caricaturist named Sumner Fauley, who had made a wildly inaccurate illustration of John and was selling copies of it. John himself may well have drawn and sold some pictures, and he was known to pose for photographs, but his primary income came from the porter work at the station.
What comes through clearly in contemporary accounts is his personality. He was described as articulate, cheerful and likeable, with a voice that people found arresting: deep and strong, with what one observer called a peculiar, indescribable quality. Travellers who disembarked at Gallatin would marvel at his size and ask him questions about his life as he and his goats made the short trip to the hotel. He became something of a local legend, a living landmark, and he seems to have worn that role with good humour.
He was known by several names. His family called him Willie. Census records and close acquaintances used William or Willie. The nickname Bud, by which he's often referred to today, was almost certainly given to him by white travellers, a product of the casual condescension directed at Black men in service roles during the Jim Crow era, where familiar or diminishing nicknames were common. The newspapers of the time weren't much kinder, frequently referring to him as the Negro Giant or the living skeleton, descriptions that tell you more about the era than they do about the man.
A Man Who Refused to Be a Spectacle
One of the most remarkable things about John Rogan is what he said no to. The late nineteenth century was the golden age of the American freak show and travelling sideshow, a world in which people with unusual bodies or conditions were put on display for paying audiences. For someone of John's size, the financial offers would have been significant. He refused all of them.
He declined, as sources of the time put it, all applications from showmen and museum managers. He wasn't interested in being exhibited. He wanted to live among his community, close to his family, doing honest work. His contemporary Ella Harper, a white woman from the same Sumner County who had a condition causing her knees to bend backwards and was exhibited as the Camel Girl in a travelling circus, eventually made $200 a week performing before returning to Tennessee. John could presumably have commanded something similar. He chose not to. It's a decision that puts him in the company of other people of the era who found different ways to survive a world eager to put unusual bodies on display; Johnny Eck, the celebrated half-boy performer from Baltimore, took the opposite path and built a career out of it, while Grace McDaniels, exhibited for years as the Mule-Faced Woman, used the sideshow circuit to support her family in a way John never needed to.
This decision wasn't just personal preference. It reflected something deeper about his sense of dignity and his relationship to his family and community. The Rogans were a tight-knit group who looked after one another, and John's ability to live as long and as well as he did was substantially a result of that collective support. He wasn't alone, and he clearly didn't want to be.
The Medical Examination That Made History
In 1899, William Lackey, then a young medical student in Gallatin and later to become the town's physician and medical examiner, approached John and his family about conducting a formal physical examination. John and his family were understandably wary of doctors, who had typically regarded him as a curiosity rather than a patient. But Lackey managed to gain their trust.
The resulting case report, which Lackey published under initials to protect some degree of anonymity, is now one of the primary sources for what we know about John's body and its dimensions. The measurements were striking. His hands were 12 inches long, longer than those of Sultan Kösen, the current tallest living man. His feet measured 13 inches. His calculated standing height of 8 feet 6 inches was independently verified by Dr Duncan Eve of Vanderbilt.
The report also established that John was, at that point, in generally good health considering his condition. He was alert, communicative and engaged. Whatever comfort he could find in his constrained circumstances, he had found it. But the years of uncontrolled growth would exact their toll.
There's a telling footnote to Lackey's examination. At the time, people believed John had already overtaken the reigning record holder, an Austrian showman named Franz Winkelmeier, billed for years as the Giant of Friedburg-Lengau at 8 feet 6 inches. Winkelmeier had spent his career touring theatres across Europe under that figure. After his death, a proper medical measurement put his real height at just 7 feet 6 inches, a full foot shorter than advertised. It's a quiet irony that sits at the heart of John's story: the touring showman's height turned out to be inflated by the very industry John refused to join, while John's own numbers came from a doctor he'd let take genuine measurements, not a promoter selling tickets.
It's also worth noting that a newspaper article from around this period mentioned that John's maternal grandfather had also been of exceptional height, requiring a larger saddle when he rode horses. Whether this points to a genetic predisposition toward pituitary issues, or simply to a family that ran tall, isn't possible to determine from this distance, but it's an intriguing detail that suggests John's condition didn't emerge entirely without precedent.
His Death and the Concrete Grave
John William Rogan died on 12 September 1905 in Gallatin, Tennessee. He was 38 years old. The cause was complications from his ankylosis, the same condition that had governed and shaped his entire adult life. He'd lost enormous amounts of weight in his final years: at the time of his death, despite his extraordinary height, he weighed only 175 pounds.
After his death, Dr Lackey estimated that John had reached 8 feet 9 inches. This is the figure that stands in the record books today, though it was based on observation and estimation rather than direct measurement, since John hadn't been able to stand for years and his family were eager to bury him before anatomists and curiosity-seekers arrived.
And that brings us to the concrete. John's family buried him in a thick concrete tomb, most likely somewhere on or near the old Rogan farmland, possibly close to a church on Blythe Street that members of the family helped to build. The exact location has never been confirmed and is likely lost permanently to history. The decision to encase the body in concrete was deliberate: the family wanted to ensure that no medical examiner, anatomist or grave robber would be able to dig him up and turn his remains into a specimen or an exhibit. It was a final act of protection for a man who'd spent his life refusing to be put on display.
He wasn't alone in needing that protection. Robert Wadlow, the tallest verified person in history who died in 1940, was also buried in concrete for the same reason. The families of exceptionally large individuals had good reason to fear posthumous exploitation: the history of medicine and curiosity cabinets is full of bodies taken and studied without consent.
His Descendants and His Legacy
John Rogan's story has a remarkable postscript that runs through professional basketball. Former NBA guard Corey Brewer, who stands 6 feet 9 inches and spent over a decade in the league, has spoken publicly about his family's connection to Rogan. Brewer's mother, Glenda, was a Rogan before she married, and John William Rogan was a cousin of her own father. Growing up, Brewer says he heard stories about their towering relative long before he understood the family tree behind them, and he isn't the only one in the family to carry the height: his brother, Jason Rogan, stands 6 feet 2 inches himself.
John Rogan holds multiple records that have never been broken: he remains the tallest person of African descent ever recorded, and the tallest non-mobile person in history. He's the second-tallest verified human being in recorded history, full stop. Robert Wadlow surpassed him in 1939, 34 years after John's death.
And yet he's largely unknown outside of record-book trivia. Part of this is the era he lived in: a Black man in post-Reconstruction Tennessee, working a modest job at a train station, refusing to seek celebrity. He left no memoir, no public speeches, no great archive of correspondence. What survives is Lackey's medical case report, a handful of newspaper references, some photographs, and the memories that rippled outward through his family and community.
What those fragments add up to is a portrait of someone who lived with enormous physical difficulty and considerable grace. He built his own means of getting around. He earned his own living. He declined to be exhibited. He stayed close to his people. He died at home, in Gallatin, surrounded by the community he'd chosen to remain part of, and his family protected him, even in death, from the world's intrusive curiosity.
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Sources
1. Guinness World Records: John William 'Willie' 'Bud' Rogan, a history of the world's tallest people
