Rockwood exists because of iron. Roane Iron Company was chartered in June 1867, John T. Wilder and Hiram Chamberlain bought nine hundred acres at the base of the plateau, and by late 1868 a blast furnace here was turning out fifteen tons a day. Coal and ore came down off the ridge, got coked on site, and the pig iron went out by river to Knoxville and Chattanooga. The town took its name from William O. Rockwood, an Indiana investor Wilder put forward because he worried that an operation fronted by a former Union general would be shunned locally. The company carried the town through a failed steel experiment in 1889, the mine explosion of October 1926 that killed thirty-two men, and finally closed around 1930, by which time Rockwood Mills and the Rockwood Stove Works had taken up the slack.
What is left is a city of 5,444 at the 2020 census, spread over about eight square miles at the foot of the eastern escarpment of the Cumberland Plateau, the wall of rock everyone here calls Walden Ridge. Watts Bar Lake forms most of the southern boundary, and the city’s fifty-two-acre waterfront park runs right down to it. US-70 comes through the middle as North Gateway Avenue before the town reaches northeast toward I-40, and the line between Eastern and Central time happens to run along the western edge, which still catches visitors out. From Mount Roosevelt up on the ridge you can see the whole place laid out below.
That is the Rockwood our caregivers come out to: streets where the same families have lived since the furnace years, parents in their eighties in houses they have owned for fifty, and no appetite whatsoever for moving to Knoxville to be closer to anybody. Home help care services here mean a hand with bathing and dressing, supper actually cooked, the pill box laid out right, a ride to the pharmacy on Gateway or a specialist over in Harriman, and someone in the room through a long Roane County afternoon. Your parent stayed in Rockwood on purpose. We make sure staying does not come to mean being on their own.
