Alfred Rehbaum, Sr., came to Mount Dora from Cincinnati, Ohio, in 1915 at age 20, when J.P. Donnelly hired him to manage Donnelly's hardware store. Rehbaum later bought the business and renamed it Rehbaum's Hardware from the Mount Dora Hardware Store. He was very involved with the colonization of Mount Dora and was one of the eight founding members of the Mount Dora Development Company. He was elected a school trustee several times, became Chamber of Commerce president in 1925, and served on the City of Mount Dora's City Council in 1928, 1931, and 1933. The Rehbaum Hardware Store was managed by three generations of the Rehbaum family before its sale in 1994 and operated from 1915 to 1994. The Rehbaum Warehouse stood on this site from 1927 to 2019 as Mount Dora's longest-standing example of Industrial Vernacular architecture, and when fully operational it housed overstock and equipment for the hardware store as well as horse-drawn carriages.