This picturesque mill is located just north of Dayton and is more than 100 years old. It is in operating condition.
In the heyday of the grist mill one further operation followed the grinding. The grist was put through a bolting cloth which separated the bran. Sometimes the bolting was done in a grist mill. More often the sifting took place in what was called a bolting mill.
Many people who never saw or even heard of a grist mill know about the millstones because of the popular sayings that have sprung up around them. Everybody has heard the phrase, “he is caught between the upper and nether millstones,” which signifies that the person referred to is in a jam. Another phrase is, “It’s all grist that comes to his mill,” meaning that the individual gets all the breaks and capitalizes every advantage. Then too, there is the phrase, “run of the mill,” which has become synonymous with routine product or performance, and “he has a millstone ’round his neck.” Perhaps the best known of all is the saying, “The mills of the gods grind slowly yet they grind exceeding fine.” Many a man has had this hurled at him when his sins of omission or commission have eventually overtaken him.
The toll for having grain ground in a grist mill was usually paid in kind. In the pioneer days the fee for grinding was four quarts out of each bushel. Later this was reduced to two quarts. Some millers received one-sixth of the grain they ground. Millers also kept what was called the “mill ring.” This was the grist that remained around the stones after the grinding was finished. No wonder the old millers waxed fat, not only in girth but in worldly goods as well.
Although battered by time and outdistanced in the march of progress, many grist mills still stand as a link between the slow sedate era of American production and these humming times of swift and continuous output. The Stony Brook Mill at Stony Brook, Long Island, is an example of how the old mills endure. Built in 1699, it is still doing business in the same quaint stone structure that housed it at birth.
Grist mills are closely associated with the early history of Dayton and its pioneer personalities. The site of Dayton was purchased in 1795 by a group of Revolutionary soldiers seeking new homesites. It was laid out as a town the same year by Israel Ludlow and Daniel C. Cooper, and named in honor of Jonathan Dayton, a soldier in the War of Independence, who later became a United States Senator from New Jersey. Dayton was incorporated as a town in the year 1805.
The old Patterson Mill stood on Brown Street at approximately the present location of the NCR factory.
It was advertised as the Rubicon Factory.