When Oregon became a US territory in the mid-1800s, a surveyor general was directed to create a
Willamette meridian and baseline to organize the area. A stone marker was placed every mile east of the
courthouse in Portland along the baseline, resulting in a road called Baseline Road (present-day
Stark Street). Rockwood developed at the ten-mile mark on Baseline Road where it intersected with Rockwood Road (present-day 181st Avenue). In the early 1900s, a school, a
grange hall, a church, and a grocery store were established, among other businesses. Rockwood was named by a local landowner named Francis Tegart for the rocks and Douglas firs that grew in the area, who encouraged the creation of a post office in the hopes of impressing his family abroad. On March 14, 1882, a storekeeper named Cyrus C. Lewis established Rockwood's first post office and became its first postmaster. The post office closed on February 28, 1903. During Prohibition in the 1920s and 1930s,
speakeasies and
roadhouses flourished in the area, and at least five houses housed
moonshiners (people making illegal alcohol). After
World War II, the area, which had previously been rural berry farms, quickly began
developing, with many new commercial centers opening. In the 1950s, developers purchased much of the land for conversion into
apartments. By the 1960s, Rockwood had multiple large mobile home parks. Its growth continued throughout the 1970s. In 1986,
Portland's MAX Light Rail expanded into
Gresham through Rockwood, and in 1987 the City of Gresham annexed Rockwood. ==Demographics==