
In addition to his involvement in the founding of Penn's School of Veterinary Medicine in 1884, Rogers was one of 55 founding members of the National Academy of Science, and chair of the Committee of Instruction at the Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts. He shared an interest in photography with his contemporaries, Thomas Eakins and Eadweard Muybridge. The first painting to depict horses in motion, Eakins' May Morning in the Park: The Fairman Rogers Four-in-Hand (1879), is based on Muybridge photographs, and demonstrates a technique mastered by Rogers for driving a carriage drawn by four horses while holding the reins in one hand.
The Fairman Rogers Collection has already served as source material for nationally recognized scholarship. Dr. Ann N. Greene, undergraduate coordinator and lecturer in Penn's history and sociology of science department, won the 2009 Fred B. Kniffen Book Award from the Pioneer America Society (PAS) for her book Horses at Work: Harnessing Power in Industrial America (Harvard University Press, 2008). In the spring of 2007, Penn Libraries hosted the exhibition, Equus Unbound: Fairman Rogers and the Age of the Horse, in tandem with the publication of Dr. Greene's book.