Is That A Cistern?

So as many of you know it seems as if I am always in the process of some type of remodeling project either on my home or that of someone else. I am currently tackling the "last" room in my house that I haven't completely torn apart, rebuilt, and painstakingly put back together. This room is at the very back of the house behind the kitchen and was part of the old service part of the house. The kitchen, now one large room, originally consisted of a butler's pantry, kitchen and then a small hallway and half bath with this room behind it. Previous owners referred to this as the maid's room. After removing the half bath to enlarge the kitchen, I don't think bathrooms and kitchens should really mix anyway, this room is now on its way to becoming the new much larger, out of the way downstairs bath. Since there was no plumbing in this room new waste and water lines needed to go in, which required tearing up the old floor and digging under the house to connect everything to existing lines. When we took up the floor we discovered a large concrete structure just inches from the bottom of the floor that was of course right where we wanted to run our lines. As soon as I saw it I thought, "Is that a cistern?" The top visible part was covered in concrete and the sides were square and made of concrete block. 

Looking down at the top and side of the cistern

For those of you who may not know, cisterns were tanks constructed to store rainwater and were a common occurrence in early Florida homes before the arrival of municipal water systems. They were typically placed under the house or to the side and are almost always found in homes constructed before 1900. Dates vary of course as they were gradually phased out over time as the state's various city's installed utilities.

703 Rockledge Dr. showing large domed cistern under the two windows
beside the house

My house. Rummell House Built 1924

Bower House. Built 1925

What makes this find odd is that my home, which was built in 1924, was part of a planned subdivision that was heralded for its modernity and included its own waterworks. If this was a cistern it would not really have been needed, and would have been a bit old fashioned in a house that was otherwise very modern. After some research I have been able to determine that it was indeed a cistern and it is one of several that were built with homes constructed in Rockledge as late as 1929. Interestingly enough all of these later date cisterns were built with homes designed by Richard Rummell, a degreed architect and early pioneer of the area. Perhaps his experience with Florida droughts or a desire to have a back up to city water prompted him to include this feature. Turns out the house directly across the street from me, designed by Rummell for prominent local contractor Hervie Bower, has a room behind the kitchen that still has a hand pump coming through the floor that is undoubtedly connected to a cistern. A little more digging, not in the dirt this time thankfully, uncovered further proof in an article published in the Cocoa Tribune in 1929 about the construction of the Phebe Blakeslee home located at 1287 Rockledge Drive and shown below. The description given for this home reads, "Adjoining the kitchen is a laundry and this is complete with built-in ironing board and rain water from a large concrete cistern." So there you have it, we definitely have a cistern. Maybe Rummell should be considered one of Florida's first "green" builders for adding this environmentally friendly feature! In any case mystery solved. Feel free to comment if you know of any other cisterns that are not exactly where you expected to find them!

Blakeslee House, courtesy of the Brevard Property Appraiser's page.  Built 1929

When Rockledge WASN'T Called Peru

While the internet has allowed us to make great strides in historical research it certainly has its downside in that it also allows false infomation to spread like wildfire. Such is the case with several websites that claim that Rockledge, Brevard's oldest city, incorporated on 7 Aug. 1887, was once called Peru, "after the Peruvian Mining Company" which supposedly had interests in the area and built a small group of houses for its workers in the 1860's. This statement has been picked up and now appears in several places online. While I had seen and heard this myself it wasn't until local historian and Rockledge resident Carole Pope called me this week and asked me if there was proof for this statement that I really thought about it.




Old Postcard of the Rockledge River Bank
Courtsey of Brevard Historial Commission

The source of the misinformation appears to be a travel article, which Carole forwarded to me, published online at  USA Today. This article correctly states that Rockledge got its name from the rock ledges to be found along the banks of the Indian River, but then goes on to mention the Peruvian Mining Company, a Peru Baptist church and some of the names of the early settlers of the area, none of which matches with what we know about the early history of Rockledge, and we know a lot! The article also states that some residents called the town Peru until the 1940s, which was another red flag as the only way Rockledge would ever have been called Peru was if it was long out of the memory of any living residents, as no one alive has ever heard it called by that name.

Some of the early settlers of Rockledge like the Hardees, Williams, and Macgruder families arrived in the 1870's and purchased or homesteaded their land from the government which shows there were no earlier owners. Eric Caron's Centennial history of Rockledge makes no mention of another name for Rockledge nor does the three volume history of the county published by our very own Historical Commission. A review of the Grantor and Grantee indexes for Brevard County land records, which go back to the County's founding days, show that no Peruvian Mining Company ever owned any land in the area.

An online search for the Peruvian Mining Company also turned up the following Wikipedia article which gives a description of an area called Riverview on the Alafia river in Hillsborough County which has almost the exact same history as that attributed to Rockledge. Since wikipeida is not always a reliable source, Carole found historical documentation in the form of a Historic Resources Survey published by Hillsborough County, which clearly shows the Peruvian Mining company's operations were in fact in Hillsborough County not Brevard County.

So, while it remains a mystery how the writer could confuse two towns on opposite sides of the Florida Coast it can now be clearly shown that the Peruvian Mining Company had nothing to do with the history of Rockledge and we can rest content that there is not some important part of our history floating out there that we had somehow misplaced!