Roger Griswold Higginson

Roger went to the theater with his aunt, Jeanette Higginson and her friend Miss Mable Gerow.  They all perished in the fire.  Both Higginson victims were transported to Lennox, Massachusetts for burial in the family plot at Church on the Hill Cemetery.

Roger's father,  George Higginson Jr., was from a Boston family with roots tracing back to America's colonial settlers. He left his father's farm in the Berkshire Hills of western Massachusetts to graduate from Harvard in 1887. Over the next seventeen years, as the nation electrified its homes, cities, and factories, he made a small fortune as an expert in power plant financing and brokering. He was President of the West Side Elevated Railway and raised prize collies.  By age forty-six, he was the largest landowner in Winnetka, IL, enjoying life as a gentleman farmer at his "Meadow Farm."  From 1896 to 1903, however, sorrow and loss ran concurrently with success for George. His first wife and second child died in childbirth in 1897, his mother two years later, and in September 1903, his three-year-old namesake, George Higginson III.  Then in December came the Iroquois fire, where he lost his sister, Jeanette Barker Higginson, and nine-year-old son, Roger Higginson.