See a photo gallery of the Ebenezer Andrew House.
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CENTERVILLE — A hundred and seventy-four years after Ebenezer Andrew, a staunch Presbyterian farmer, built one of Centerville’s first brick houses, a Presbyterian minister/attorney is back in the house.
Greg Gibson, both a minister and an attorney, and attorney Steve O’Keefe moved their law offices, Gibson & O’Keefe, LPA, from the Kettering Tower in Dayton to the Ebenezer Andrew House at 6239 Wilmington Pike at the beginning of July.
Before moving, they spent six months restoring the house. They’re renting the house, and owner Jim Keyes, a Centerville realtor, worked with them on the restoration.
“I think it looks really good,” Keyes said. “I was glad to see that Greg and Steve had the foresight to bring it up to date, making it as authentic as they could.”
The interior of the building was stripped down from walls to floors, as in recent years “it had been all modern inside,” Gibson said. “As much as possible we tried to find the original type paint to restore it to what it would have looked like in the mid-1800s. We thought saving this would really be exciting. We tried to bring in antique-type furniture that would have been compatible with that time.”
A large colonial-style bookcase in the north parlor holds their medical books. “We limit our practice to medical malpractice,” Gibson said. He grew up in Westchester County, N.Y., in a historical area and “I’ve always been interested in history,” he said. He came to this area in the early ’70s as a Presbyterian minister and still serves the parish at College Hill Presbyterian Church, he said.
O’Keefe was born in Dayton and raised in the Dayton/Springfield area. He practiced law in Cincinnati for 10 years, representing doctors, hospitals and nursing homes, but for four and a half years has practiced medical malpractice law. Both lawyers are married and each has five children.
Ebenezer E. Andrew, born in 1800 in Nashville, Tenn., came with his parents to Ohio with the Presbyterian migration of 1804, according to the Centerville-Washington Twp. Historical Society’s history in A Sense of Place, of the house. They settled in Greene County and Ebenezer Andrew married Stephen White’s daughter Hannah in 1827. Ebenezer and his second wife, Pauline Tate, had nine children. They moved into the two-story brick Georgian-style house he built in 1835 on land he bought along Wilmington Pike in 1827.
The original five-room house consisted of the present front two-story sections and an adjoining dining area, according to the history. The square-headed nails of the original tongue and groove ash flooring, six to eight inches wide, can be seen in the refinished floor. Each of the two parlors has a fireplace. Additions to the house were made in 1852, in the 1880s, 1938, and in 1984 when it was converted to an office building.
Contact this reporter at (937) 225-2341 or kullmer@DaytonDailyNews.com.
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