Over the years, his house on Driscoll Street has given up a variety of hidden treasures, including handwritten letters and a rosary hidden behind a mantle and a rare L. Storts milk bottle.
He has learned about John Driscoll through the signed drawings the man left on the walls of the house before the turn of the century. Driscoll was a painter of carriages and married to Emily Perrin, whose father Joseph Ingram Perrin built the house in 1851.
During remodeling, Perry was careful to preserve the drawings, and still keeps his eye out for other surprises left by the former owners.
The house is located in a corner of Springfield Twp., near Mad River Twp. In the yard, the metal detector found a 1917 standing Liberty quarter, a 1938 wheat penny and a copper “coin” unlike any he had seen before. It read, “A. J. Rebert, One Loaf, Springfield Ohio.”
Perry knew it had to have something to do with Rebert Pike, which was less than a mile from Perry’s home, as the crow flies. He thinks there might have one time been a dirt lane that connected the house to Rebert Pike.
Today, Rebert Pike winds from the edge of Springfield, across a corner of Springfield Twp. through the middle of Mad River Twp. past Greenon High School to where it dead ends in Enon at Indian Valley School.
Country road names tell a story, but few people have a clue about the story behind Rebert Pike.
Since there was no town named Rebert, most of us have for years figured that Rebert was named after an early farm family. Actually it had more in common with Old Mill Road, which led to an old mill.
That is where I found it in an old atlas of Clark County. A.J. Rebert’s grist mill was located not far from Springfield near where West Possum Road dead ends at Rebert Pike. There is still a creek and a pond in the area.
Natalie Stone Fritz of the Clark County Historical Society helped me find references to Rebert’s Mill in the organization’s archives.
To sum it up, there has been a mill at the corner of West Possum and Rebert Pike since before Clark County was organized in 1817. Early settlers took their grain to this mill to be ground into flour and meal. The mill was owned, moved around and improved by a list of millers. In 1852, it was purchased by Andrew J. Rebert. He managed it for 20 years.
According to Fritz, during that time, especially during the Civil War, 1861-65, when money was scarce, tokens were made locally for items like loaves of bread or rides on street cars.
On the back of the coin Perry found the words, “Wadsworth Engraving Company, Springfield Ohio.” Fritz said that the Heritage Center of Clark County has a good collection of tokens and coins created by this company, but they do not have one from the Rebert Mill.
According to Perry’s research, Rebert’s Mill was “40 feet square, three stories high, used Leffel’s wheel and produced 30 barrels of flour a day.”
There are no records that tell us that a bakery was located at the mill, but historians tell us that often millers were paid with a portion of the flour they had just ground. Enterprising millers either sold that flour or used it to bake and sold the bread. This coin gives confirmation that something like that happened at this mill too. There are no dates on when the mill closed.
I found myself thinking that something was missing from this story, and Perry mentioned it also when we spoke.
“I wish I had a photo of it,” he said. And I had to agree.
Mills were important for communities to thrive and Springfield was full of mills on just about every creek, run or river that had the correct slope to build a dam for a millpond or to set up a mill race. The perfect geography and flowing water for constructing mills is why Clark County had so many mills then factories before the rest of the state.
Each mill was different; constructed by a millwright to take the best advantage of the moving water. The mill converted the energy of the flowing water to mechanical energy that moved the grind stones and ground the corn. Later at other mills, the mill wheel turned shafts that drove all sorts of equipment.
Millwrights were the engineers and innovators of that day, and nowhere is it more apparent than Clifton Mill, were visitors can tour a mill from the same time period as the Rebert Mill. It truly is an antique engineering marvel, and I’m sure Rebert Mill was the same way. I just wish I could see it.
Somewhere I know someone has a photo or a sketch of a three-story mill important enough to name a road after it and to make copper tokens to give out loaves of bread. If you know of a sketch or photograph of Rebert’s Mill, please contact me at pamcottrel@gmail.com.
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