He served briefly in the First Troop Philadelphia City Cavalry during the American Civil War and volunteered his engineering talents to survey the Potomac River and during the Antietam and Gettysburg campaigns.

He served as director of the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts, as chairman of their committee on instruction from 1878 to 1883, and led the competition for the design and construction of their new building.

[4] After graduation, he befriended professor Alexander Dallas Bache who worked as Superintendent of the United States Coast Survey.

[3] He recruited the controversial artist Thomas Eakins back to teach at the school, and commissioned the painting from him: The Fairman Rogers Four-in-Hand (1879–80).

[4] Rogers and Eakins were advocates of the work of Eadweard Muybridge and his pioneering photography technique of capturing the movement of horses.

[13] In 1861, he served as first sergeant[14] in the First Troop Philadelphia City Cavalry for three months during the American Civil War.

[6] As a volunteer officer in the United States Army Corps of Engineers, he completed an 1862 survey mapping the Potomac River.

Based on this process, Eakins modeled three écorché statuettes to serve as teaching tools for equine musculature.

[4] In 1903, his brother-in-law, Horace Howard Furness, wrote a biographical memoir titled F. R. [Fairman Rogers] 1833-1900 (Philadelphia: privately printed, 1903).

In 2007, the University hosted an exhibition titled "Equus Unbound: Fairman Rogers and the Age of the Horse" which displayed works from the collection.