84-Lancaster Farming, Saturday, May 11, 1985
Rural electric
(Continued from Page B 2)
paper as an incorporator of Adams
Electric, the head of the company
came and offered to extend the line
to his home at no cost. Schwartz
recalls with a laugh, “I said,
‘wouldn’t that be a hell of a way to
let down my ijeighbors?’ ”
Brown recalls that he sometimes
had to go back four or five times to
persuade people to sign the
membership application. Then,
once enough signatures were
secured, he had to return to gpt
rights of ways signed. Brown said
that the cooperative took the
shortest route across fields to save
money.
He said, “Some people didn’t like
the idea of the lines running across
the land, and thought they should
keep to the roads, but they cut the
mileage in half that way.” Sch
wartz added that building lines as
the crow flies saved corners and
guide posts.
Brown pointed out that not
everyone along the proposed route
signed up, so some lines had to be
built later. He said most people
who didn’t sign up wished they
had.
It took many hours and many
visits to talk to prospective
cooperative members, and Brown
says, “I wonder how I had the
time.” Rainy days were good ones
to visit, he said, and pointed out
that he did it because “we were
working for the community and for
the farmers. Most people would
sign up to help their neighbors.”
There was to be a minimum
monthly charge of $3 and Sch
wartz’s daughter, Eva Jane,
recalls, “Most people thought they
weren’t going to use much.” Of
course that quickly changed as
they saw the many uses of elec
tricity.
Brown remembers that they
were threshing on his dairy farm
when the electricity was first
turned on. His wife, Elizabeth, was
visiting her sister in the hospital,
and requested that all the lights be
turned on so that she could see
them when she turned in from the
main road.
Light bulbs then were mostly 15
and 20 watt bulbs, but they were
considered “big,” according to
Eva Jane. The light provided from
a single, naked bulb was
tremendous compared to the
lanterns being used
There is an anecdote about a
storekeeper of a general store
boasting of his new electric light
for a month before discovering it
was only the night light over the
cash register. When a co-op em
ployee showed him how to turn on
the rest of the lights, he was
speechless with amazement.
Elsewhere in the country the
turning on of lights brought similar
expressions of wonder and awe
There is a story told by a Kentucky
farmer about the day the lights
came on in his farm home. There
were just bare bulbs in each room
and when his father pulled the
chain to turn on the light in the
kitchen he said, “Carl, come here
and hang onto this so I can turn on
the light in the sitting room.” The
farmer recalls telling his father to
stop holding the chain because it
would stay on. He said, “He finally
let go, and then looked kind of
foolish.”
Brown said that the change in
the daily life of the farmer came
gradually. “A lot couldn’t afford to
jump into it all at once.” Fur
thermore, many people had
already owned generators, and
while electricity made the job of
getting power a lot easier, it didn’t
change their lives completely.
Brown said that he continued to
cool the milk in the spring long
after the electric lines were in to
save money. An electric milker
was purchased primarily because
they didn’t have a hired man.
One of the things made possible
by electricity was indoor plumbing
since water could be pumped.
Washing machines, electric water
heaters and other appliances came
along slowly.
Eva Jane recalls that the
cooperative always gave electric
appliances as door prizes at lIS’
meetings, and they often sold
appliances to make it convenient
for people to acquire them. Local
stores did not carry a big selection
of electric appliances.
There can be no question that the
rural homemaker benefited from
electricity as much as or more
than her farmer husband. No
longer did she need to do her
canning over the wood stove in the
heat of the summer. No longer did
she scorch shirts and iron with
“sadirons,” heated on the wood
stove. And she didn’t need to use an
icebox anymore. All of the ap
pliances for the home made her life
much easier.
Eva Jane pointed out that the
cooperative used home economists
to help promote the use ot elec
tricity and to help people un
derstand it.
In the early days of rural elec
trification there were many
outages. Schwartz recalls, "Trees
were the mam problem.” People
accepted these many interruptions
of service as an inconvenience to
be tolerated. Eva Jane says,
"People were more patient then.
We kept a coal oil lamp on each
floor so it was handy if the lights
went out. We lived a much quieter
life then.”
Schwartz maintained an active
role in the cooperative, serving as
a director until he was 85 years old.
32 years from his first year as an
incorporator. He said the biggest
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challenge facing the cooperatives
today is the education of its
members, few of whom remember
the days when the countryside was
dark.
Today Pennsylvania’s 13 rural
electric cooperatives serve 600,000
members. Adams Electric will
celebrate its 50th anniversary in
1991
Like most people looking back on
the struggle to bring electricity to
the countryside, Brown says, “I’d
hate to start over.”
Indeed, most rural people would
not like to go back to the days of no
electricity. Though they lived
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without it tor many more years
than their city cousins, it was
electricity that increased
agriculture’s productivity and
attracted industry to rural areas.
Rural electric cooperatives,
made possible through that order
signed by President Roosevelt 50
years ago, truly have changed the
face of the countryside. The hard
work of the men and women who
brought electricity to themselves
and their neighbors in cooperation
with the government is a
remarkable success story. The day
the lights went on was a day which
changed rural lives forever.
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