Our History............
Milam County is a county located in the U.S. state of Texas. The county seat is Cameron. The county was created in 1834 as a municipality in Mexico and organized as a county in 1837. Milam County is named for Benjamin Rush Milam, an early settler and a soldier in the Texas Revolution.
In 1825, Robert Leftwich, representative of the Texas Association of Nashville, Tennessee, was able to receive a land grant to colonize the Milam County area from Mexico. The boundaries for this land grant "followed the Navasota River, turned southwest along the San Antonio road to the divide between the Brazos and the Colorado rivers, then northwest to the Comanche Trail, and east back to the Navasota"
In 1827, Sterling Robertson took over the colonization effort but the area was not progressing and the land grant was revoked in 1830. Sam Houston and his business partner, Samuel May Williams, tried to get the land grant transferred to them from the Mexican government in 1831, but Mexico did not like Houston. In 1834, Sterling Robertson took back control of the land grant and the area started to grow with individuals coming to the Milam County area.
At the time of the colonization the area (colony) was known as Municipality of Viesca to the Mexican government. In 1835, it was renamed the Municipality of Milam by the legislative body of the Provisional Government of Texas in honor of Benjamin Rush Milam. The area was not known as Milam County until the first Congress of the Republic of Texas, in which the municipality was named.
Milam County Genealogy Trail
Alcoa-The power plant existed only because of an aluminum smelter several miles southwest of Rockdale and the millions of tons of lignite coal just under the surface. The Alcoa plant started production in 1952, and the power plant and coal mine followed shortly after.
Eventually, Alcoa Rockdale grew into the company’s largest aluminum smelter and — along with the mine and power plant — employed as many as 2,000 workers by around 2004, according to Alcoa officials.
The Pittsburgh-based company dominated the Rockdale area for more than a half-century. Generations of fathers and sons, uncles and nephews worked together at the aluminum smelter, the power plant or the coal mine.
The Dallas Morning News