Rockwood, Michigan: Mills on the Huron

Rockwood sits where the Huron River meets the flatlands of southeastern Wayne County. The first land deed in the area dates to seventeen ninety-six, and by eighteen eighteen the settlement had its first business, Chamberlain's Mill, processing grain and timber for the early farms. The community found an unusual economic niche in the decades after the Civil War: a thriving basket industry that employed residents from eighteen sixty-two all the way to nineteen twenty-two.

Shipping by boat along the Huron carried those baskets and other goods outward. Rockwood was incorporated as a village in nineteen twenty-six and became a city in nineteen sixty-four, one of the quieter communities in the busy Downriver corridor south of Detroit.