Rockford was Laphamville first — and got its new name from a rocky ford in the river

A man named Smith Lapham showed up on the banks of the Rogue River in 1843 to help finish someone else’s dam and sawmill, and ended up giving the whole town its first name. The dam was William Hunter’s project; for his help, Hunter handed Lapham forty acres on the east bank of the river. Hunter soon moved on. Lapham stayed put, built his own sawmill by 1844, and never left — and because most of the new settlement sat on land he owned or sold, people just called the place Laphamville. By the fall of 1845 it was up to about five houses.

Laphamville it stayed for twenty years, even after it was formally platted under that name in 1856. Then the Grand Rapids and Indiana Railroad pushed its tracks north through town in the mid-1860s, and the railroad men had opinions. They wanted something shorter and snappier than “Laphamville” on the timetable. A recent arrival from Rockford, Illinois pitched his old hometown’s name, arguing it fit perfectly: just below the dam there was a shallow, rocky ford where travelers had always crossed the river. A rocky ford. Rockford.

The vote was close, but the new name carried, and the town was replatted as Rockford in 1865. It incorporated as a village in June 1866 with 315 residents.

The dam is still there on the Rogue, right in the middle of downtown, and the river still runs shallow and stony below it the way it did for the wagon crossings. The name nobody quite agreed on turned out to describe the most permanent thing in town — the place where the water goes thin over the rocks.