Crime Scene and Trauma Cleanup in Rockdale, TX

Rockdale is a city in southern Milam County at the intersection of U.S. Highway 79 and Farm Roads 908 and 487, about 41 miles from College Station.

The Rockdale area was a crossing point of El Camino Real, and around 1751 the Spanish built the San Francisco Xavier de Gigedo presidio nearby to protect three missions along the San Xavier River.

The town itself developed in 1873 when the International-Great Northern Railroad came through, and it was named by Mrs. B. F. Ackerman for a nearby rock that stood twelve feet high with a circumference of twenty feet — the rock's location has since been lost.

Rockdale incorporated in 1878 and quickly became the first major railroad town in Milam County, a shipping point for cotton, wool, grain, hides, and livestock.

By 1884 Rockdale had 1,700 residents, five churches, two schools, two steam gristmill-cotton gins, a 250-seat opera house, a private bank, and a weekly newspaper.

Lignite coal mining powered Rockdale's early economy — by 1914 the town was shipping some 7,000 railroad cars of lignite every week.

When Alcoa built its aluminum facility near Rockdale in the 1950s, the town's population nearly tripled within six years, rising from about 2,300 in 1954 to 6,300 in 1958.

The 2020 census counted 5,323 people in Rockdale, living in 2,137 households.

Census QuickFacts reports about 2,191 households in Rockdale with a 63.4 percent owner-occupied housing rate.