Lizzie Lape

Lizzie Lape (August 15, 1853 – sometime after Thanksgiving 1917) was a mid-Ohio madam who owned and operated multiple bordellos at the end of the 19th century and early into the 20th.

Lizzie Lape was born Amy Elizabeth Rogers in Whitley County, Kentucky before the Civil War. She was the daughter of Prior and Cynthia (Whitman) Rogers of Williamsburg, Kentucky and granddaughter of a Revolutionary War veteran named James Rogers of Laurel and Whitley Counties, Kentucky.

In the late 1970s, family oral history revealed these details to Lizzie’s descendants: she came from the South, was a lady of the evening, had a business in Chicago, and became a madam who ran a house of ill repute in Stow, Ohio.

A great-great-granddaughter, Debra Lape, discovered much more of Lizzie’s purposefully obscured story over the next forty years, publishing a book in 2014 titled, Looking For Lizzie – The True Story of an Ohio Madam, Her Sporting Life and Hidden Legacy.

Lizzie Rogers married eight times, to Jeremiah Lape, George Huffman, Jack Larzelere, Harry DeWitt (son), Jack DeWitt (father), Charles Veon, James Shetler, and John France.

She owned and/or operated brothels and saloons in Dayton, Lima, Marion, Akron, Stow, and Shelby covering five counties, some simultaneously, including the "White Pigeon" of both Marion and Shelby, Ohio.

Local newspapers such as the Akron Beacon Journal and the Marion Daily Star capitalized on the sensational and disreputable nature of her businesses, both public and private, providing a useful trail for her great-great-granddaughter to follow when historic newspapers were digitized one hundred years later.

One of the interesting historic revelations in the genealogical biography included an account involving the Marion Daily Star's young editor Warren G. Harding and a hoax staged by him upon a competing newspaper editor at Lizzie's White Pigeon.

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