10/12/2026
Worth the read… one of my favorite little spots right here in our backyard.
A woman in Yellow Springs reaches up and turns on a light. It is a few years after 1908, and she pays a dollar a month for the privilege. The power running into her kitchen comes from a flour mill in Clifton, made by the same falling water that grinds the corn.
For close to thirty years that mill kept a generator going on the Little Miami. Clifton, Cedarville and Yellow Springs all took their electricity from it, at that same flat dollar a month, until the late 1930s.
By then the water had been working at that spot for more than a century. The river narrows at Clifton and drops into a limestone gorge, and in 1802 a Revolutionary War veteran named Owen Davis saw what all that moving water could turn. He built a grist mill there.
Davis and his son-in-law, Benjamin Whiteman, added a sawmill and a distillery. The little settlement that grew up around them was called Davis Mills, which tells you exactly who was in charge.
It did not keep that name. The village took its name from the cliffs over the river, and it stuck the way a name does when it describes what everybody is already looking at.
Within a few years another man had bought land from Davis. His name was Robert Patterson, and when the War of 1812 came he was serving as a quartermaster, the man responsible for keeping an army clothed and fed. Clifton went to war with him. His woolen mill made cloth for uniforms, and the grist mill ground cornmeal for federal troops.
Walk that one mile of river in its busy years and you would have passed six mills. There was a woolen mill, a sawmill, a paper mill, a barrel mill, a second grist mill, and this one. Clifton was also a stop on the stagecoach line between Springfield and Cincinnati, so travelers came through on their way somewhere else.
Then the railroads went somewhere else too. When the tracks bypassed the village, the manufacturers drifted off one by one. The census high came in 1880, and Clifton has never been that big again.
The mill had troubles of its own, and most of them were fire. Two earlier buildings on the site burned in the 1800s, and the one standing over the gorge now is the third. After the fire of 1869, the owners rebuilt and put in a turbine where the old water wheel had been.
The Armstrong family ran it for about twenty years. Three generations of the Preston family ran it after that, until 1948. A string of owners came and went, and in 1987 the Satariano family bought it, mostly so somebody would keep it standing.
Here is what people get wrong.
The Patterson part usually gets told with him as the NCR founder's father, a frontier miller whose boy grew up to sell cash registers to the whole country. It is a tidy line between a gorge in Greene County and an empire in Dayton, and it skips a whole generation. Robert Patterson was John H. Patterson's grandfather.
John H. was born in 1844, the son of Robert's youngest boy, Jefferson. He took control of the National Cash Register Company in 1884. By then the old colonel had been gone for more than fifty years, and he never laid eyes on the grandson who made the family name famous.
That leaves the mill with a better claim than borrowed fame anyway. Of those six mills on the river, it is the only one still standing, and it is one of the largest water-powered grist mills still in operation anywhere in the country.
You can sit in the dining room over breakfast and look straight down at the Little Miami going past. In about six weeks the owners will cover the whole place, the mill, the gorge and the bridge, in more than four million Christmas lights, and the crowds will come back.
October is quieter. The leaves come down into the gorge, the water still goes over the dam, and a building that once kept the lights on in three villages for a dollar a month is still doing the one job it was built for.
Real photograph, not AI. Photo: Art Anderson, CC BY-SA 3.0, via Wikimedia Commons (text added).
