Rockwood, Tennessee Rockwood, Tennessee Location of Rockwood, Tennessee Location of Rockwood, Tennessee Rockwood is a town/city in Roane County, Tennessee, United States.
3.2 Roane Iron Company Rockwood is positioned at 35 52 9 N 84 40 31 W (35.869147, -84.675176). The town/city is situated at the base of the easterly escarpment of the Cumberland Plateau, known locally as Walden Ridge.
The Watts Bar Lake impoundment of the Tennessee River provides much of Rockwood's southern boundary.
Rockwood is a familiar site to travelers who incessant I-40 between Knoxville and Nashville, as dramatic views of Rockwood and the Tennessee Valley beyond line the interstate just before it peaks at the edge of the Cumberland Plateau.
According to the United States Enumeration Bureau, the town/city has a total region of 7.9 square miles (20 km2), of which 7.9 square miles (20 km2) is territory and 0.1 square miles (0.26 km2) (0.63%) is water.
The Roane Iron Company furnace site at the end of Rockwood Street; the small building on the left is all that remains of the once vast iron works After the war, Wilder and Ohio-born Knoxville Iron Company founder Hiram Chamberlain (1835 1916) purchased 900 acres (360 ha) at what is now Rockwood, selecting the locale due to the ore and coal resources at the base of Walden Ridge, the adjacency to the Tennessee River, and an assumption that the encroaching barns s would descend the Plateau at close-by Emory Gap.
Wilder and Chamberlain enlisted a several other investors from Indiana and Ohio, and the Roane Iron Company was chartered on June 18, 1867. By late 1868, the business had constructed a blast furnace with a capacity of 15 tons per day between the ridge and the end of what is now Rockwood Street. In the early 1880s, Roane Iron purchased a rolling foundry in Chattanooga and experimented with steel production, but the Walden Ridge ore proved to be too low-quality for such a process, and the business abandoned its steel venture in 1889. Roane Iron's Rockwood furnace working a mix of small-town workforce (both caucasian and African-American) and immigrants (especially Welsh immigrants), and did not practice wage discrimination. The business paid workers either cash, which was issued on paydays, or scrip, which could be issued anytime at the worker's request.
Other than a miners' strike in 1904, Roane Iron experienced mostly several workforce disputes, even though workforce organizations were active in Rockwood.
A series of quarrying accidents namely a 1926 mine explosion damaged the company's image and led to out-of-control workers' compensation payments, however, and in 1929 Roane Iron shut down operations. Worried that the region's Confederate-sympathizers might shun an operation led by a well-known Union general, Wilder decided to name Roane Iron's business town after one of its lesser-known Indiana investors, William O.
In spite of the name, William Rockwood played only a minor part in Roane Iron's affairs, and the early evolution of the town was largely the work of Wilder and Chamberlain.
Unlike the "boom" suburbs in close-by Cardiff and Harriman, Rockwood's expansion was gradual.
Rockwood's populace interval from 696 in 1870 to 1,011 in 1880.
Saloons became commonplace in Rockwood in the 1880s, however, and Roane Iron began to struggle with absenteeism, as many employees worked for just a several days per week in order to make enough cash for a "weekend of drinking and fighting." In 1887, after the state's "four-mile" law effectively banned saloons in unincorporated areas, a section of the town incorporated as "East Rockwood" to dodge the law.
Rockwood, which incorporated in 1890, passed an ordinance banning the sale of alcohol in 1903, but the ordinance didn't apply to barns s, and the so-called "jug train" from Chattanooga continued supplying Rockwood with liquor until the statewide prohibition law took effect in 1909. Noting the success of territory auctions in close-by Cardiff and Harriman, Roane Iron held its own territory auction for Rockwood in May 1890, selling a several hundred lots and raising $600,000.
To promote the city, the business laid out new streets, assembled new hotels, and allowed general stores to set up shop in the town/city and compete with the business store. These de-paternalization measures helped Rockwood survive the Panic of 1893, which doomed neighboring Cardiff. Former Roane Iron employee James Tarwater established Rockwood Mills, which produced hosiery, in 1905.
Another former Roane Iron employee, Sewell Howard, established Rockwood Stove Works in 1916.
After Roane Iron's collapse in 1929, Rockwood struggled with unemployment.
Burn (1885 1977), Tennessee legislator who broke the deadlock on the 19th Amendment to the United States Constitution and gave women the right to vote in the United States a b c d e f g h i j William Moore, "Preoccupied Paternalism: The Roane Iron Company In Her Company Town Rockwood, Tennessee." Stanley Wassom, "Rockwood A Historic Perspective".
The City of Rockwood official website, 2006.
John Benhart, Appalachian Aspirations: The Geography of Urbanization and Development in the Upper Tennessee River Valley, 1865-1900 (Knoxville, Tenn.: University of Tennessee Press, 2007), pp.
Terry Morrow, Insider: Rockwood starlet morphs from tomboy to 'sexiest', Knoxville News Sentinel, May 2, 2008 Wikimedia Commons has media related to Rockwood, Tennessee.
Official City of Rockwood website Rockwood, Tennessee Roane County Heritage Commission website Municipalities and communities of Roane County, Tennessee, United States Harriman Kingston Oak Ridge Rockwood
Categories:
Cities in Roane County, Tennessee - Cities in Tennessee - Company suburbs in Tennessee - Populated places on the Tennessee River
|