Rockwood: The Iron Town Built by a Civil War General

General John T. Wilder had a plan when the Civil War ended. He had fought at Chickamauga not far from here and seen the mineral wealth of East Tennessee's ridges, iron ore in the hills and coal in the seams above them. In eighteen sixty-seven, Wilder and two other veterans founded the Roane Iron Company and broke ground on what would become the first iron furnace south of the Ohio River to use mineral coal as fuel.

They built a company town to go with it, naming it Rockwood after William O. Rockwood, an Indiana investor in the company. Within eighteen months, workers arrived from Wales, England, Pennsylvania, and the industrial Midwest to fill the mines and tend the furnaces. The company built the church, the schools, and the company housing, as was the custom.

At its peak the furnace produced fifteen tons of iron a day. The Roane Iron Company ran for more than sixty years before shutting down in nineteen twenty-nine following a string of mining accidents and mounting workers' compensation costs. The town it left behind still stands on the Clinch River in Roane County.