During a family get together a couple of weeks ago one of my children asked me what it was like before electricity. He asked me to put it into a story, so here goes. I went through the first eighteen years of my life before electric power came to the Peterson homestead in November of 1936. I had finished high school the previous June which means that all of my home work for school was done by either kerosene or a mantle lamp.
What you have never had you do not miss. We had seen the bright lights in town and understood the benefits but when at home you coped with what you had. There was no running water or hot water heaters. You couldn't even flush a toilet but used a path to a out house situated a hundred feet from the back door. Cooking was entirely on a wood burning cook stove that had a water reservoir on the back to warm the water. Bathing brought out a wash tub that was filled from this reservoir . Water was pumped mostly by the wind and a supply tank behind the kitchen door was filled nearly to the top. It had an overflow pipe that diverted the water to the barn by gravity flow. Our water at the Peterson house had a high iron content which would on occasion coagulate and settle to the bottom of the supply tank so all that came out of the faucet would be a brown mass of sediment. The tank would then have to be cleaned and start over. A large cistern in the basement caught the soft rain water from the house roof during a rain to be used for dish washing and bathing. A pitcher pump brought it up to the kitchen sink from the basement. {that way we did not have any leaky faucets}. Electricity brought pressure pump and running water but I missed the soft rain water.
At night our main source of light came from kerosene wick lamps. They had to be filled daily from a five gallon supply can., wicks had to be trimmed and adjusted. The globe would be removed to clean the black accumulation of black soot. Each room had one of these lamps including most of the bed rooms of the older children. To do the chores in the barn lanterns were used, they would be hung from a wire on a nail from the ceiling to keep them down far enough to prevent fire above them and off the floor where straw could catch on fire. When dad lit the lanterns it signaled that it was chore time and we had to get started.
We were instructed from a very early age how to deal with matches. Now days children are taught that they should not be touched or played with. We were taught how to use them and to be careful. Sometimes my mother would ask us to go to the basement and get a can of fruit for supper. It would be pitch black down there. Most of the time we knew from memory where each kind of canned goods was stored so we like a blind man would go down and get what ever was wanted. On those times that we needed a light for a short time a match would be struck so you could find what you were after before the match burned down to your fingers. We were allowed to use matches at a very young age, but we were also taught to respect them.
Toast was made by putting the bread directly on top of the stove. If the fire was to hot you had burned edges. Pancakes came off a griddle placed on top of the stove. It was a large cast iron round flat griddle, eighteen inches in diameter. The cook stove was a source of both heating of the kitchen and cooking. When electricity first came and we installed an electric stove that heat was missing and we missed it too. Flat irons to press clothes were just that flat irons. They were heated on the stove top and picked up with a handle that snapped into the top. Usually several irons were used at a time all were heated on the kitchen stove top and rotated as they cooled down . Some came in different shapes to be used in different situations. The style while going to high school was to have a very sharp crease in your trousers. Many nights found me pressing my pants for the next day.
Wash day started early in the morning by putting the wash boiler {a copper tank that held about ten gallons of water} on the kerosene fired oil stove to heat. As it became hot a generous supply of Fels Naptha soap was shaved from a bar and added to it. At first we had a hand driven washing machine that required a handle to be worked back and forth rubbing the cloths between wooden slats. Later my dad bought a Maytag washing machine that operated with a gasoline engine. It was necessary to exhaust it out side the house through a flexible hose that came with the machine. The wringer was of the two roller type used regularly up until just a few years ago Our dryer was the line out back of the house that the cloths were put on no matter how cold the weather was. If you have never hung wet cloths on the line in zero weather you have missed one of the coldest finger jobs that I have ever performed.
Small tools like grinders for sharpening tools would be driven by hand. We had a large grinder powered with a crank and a belt that increased the rpms of the grinding wheel. It was us kids that got the job of turning the crank. At first I thought it would be fun but some of the grinding jobs took time and it became a bit tedious. We also had a wet stone grinding wheel for sharpening mower sickles. {self sharpening sickles had not come into use yet.} A days mowing of hay resulted in two hours of sharpening. It would take a lot of time to grind a sickle on each side of a section and it would be a bit tedious especially to a ten year old boy. I would get yelled at if the wheel did not travel in a uniform speed. There was to be no pulling down hard on the crank on the way down and ease up on the way up. I was eleven years old and was turning the crank for my dad sharpening a sickle when a neighbor came over to tell us that LD's dad had been in the farm accident that cut his legs off and that he had died. It has stayed in my memory as though it was just yesterday that the accident happened. I can not see one of those grinders with out thinking back to that day.
Some foods such as dairy products were hard to keep from spoiling but being on a dairy farm fresh milk was brought to the house daily. If some started to sour it was allowed to curdle with the help of the warming oven on the stove. The whey was drained off and the curds seasoned with salt and chopped onion. We had a tasty treat of real cottage cheese., not the cultured stuff available in stores today. Leftovers from the table found there way into the dogs dish . He was well fed. No store bought dog food ever got to him.
Without refrigeration to freeze our meat we had three choices You could cut it up and can it as vegetables are done now, or you salt it down and smoke it, or just leave it as salt pork or leave it hang to freeze with the cold winter weather and cut off pieces of meat as you needed them. Butchering time was usually the first part of December and the hog would be hung high enough so that stray cats and dogs could not reach it. My mother would send us kids out to the corn crib where we kept the meat hanging to cut off a piece for supper. We would be armed with a big butcher knife and little know how of cutting meat. We would hack away at any place of the frozen carcass that would give us a portion with out to much trouble. Cutting frozen meat is no fun. If a warm spell came the meat had to be done up quickly. It was cut up into chunks and stored in large thirty gallon crocks and packed in with salt so that no air was left, and water added to form a brine. The meat could be kept in this manner way into hot summer weather. Sometimes more than one hog was butchered at the same time so the meat was cut into small one inch squares and canned in fruit jars. This was a tedious job but the meat would keep very well. Canned meat is very tasty with a special flavor that I always enjoyed. Some farmers had smoke houses that would be used to make bacon out of the side pork and smoked hams from the legs and hips. Spoonville did not get its electricity until after I was out of high school which required that any studying that I had to do at home was by lamp light. You moved the lamp on the table as close to your studying as you could . It did not seem a problem to me at the time but I wonder how to days high school student would fare under the same conditions.
Very few radios were in homes before the coming of electricity. We had a victrola that wound up with a crank and finally an old battery operated Attwater Kent radio that operated on direct current. It had three dials that had to be synchronized to bring in various stations. We could get some New York . Cincinnati, Louisville and Chicago stations. We were flabbergasted by this phenomenon . I couldn't understand it then and I don't understand it now. How could voices be transmitted through the air?
Rumors started circulating in the summer of 1936 that the power company might extend its power line into our neighbor hood if enough customers could hook up in a given length of transmission line to make it pay. So many miles of line had to produce so much revenue. A survey was taken in the neighborhood and each household estimated what they would be willing to pay monthly whether you used that much electricity or not. Most people volunteered about a four or five dollar amount but Mr. Fritz doubled it to eight. An unheard of amount of money. No one thought you could use that much electricity. Anyway the power company informed us they would extend their line into our neighbor hood and that we should get our houses and farms ready for them. It required having every thing wired both, house and barn and all out buildings that could use the power. An inspector would have to look over and OK each place before the power company would install a meter. By early November a contractor wired our place and all the needed fixtures installed. We had been inspected and approved but it took the power company several days to get around to installing the meter. Gordon who liked to dabble in electricity slipped a jumper in the meter box so that we enjoyed our power before it was officially turned on. Gordon had to be careful not to have his jumper visible during the daylight hours when the power company representative might show up. He only done it a couple of times but it was a treat for us.
Soon appliances began showing up such as a toaster , electric irons. mixers and power grinders out in the shop. Gordon was working in the Norge Refrigerator Plant in Muskegon at the time so that was the model that my dad purchased. He also surprised my mother with a new electric range for cooking. This created another problem as we no longer had the cook stove to furnish heat in the kitchen so we had to install a gravity furnace in the basement. Water pressure and flush toilets moved the outside privy into the house along with a shower stall. It wasn't long before we were exceeding the few dollars promised the power company on our monthly billing.
Many of our hand tools such as the hand saw became as obsolete as the proverbial buggy whip. I cannot visualize how fast the changes came that electricity has made in our lives in just sixty years. With the advent of the computer age we have advanced so fast that someone like myself is left in bewilderment. Our brains do not seem to keep up with the technology as fast as it is thrust upon us. The younger generation like our grand children who are being taught this technology in the lower eliminatory grades seem to grasp it much easier than I can. Sometimes I wonder if all that technology is for the better. We were just as happy with our slow easy going lifestyle that we had before electricity was thrust upon us. I'm sure if the older generation would be polled they would all vote for the progress that has come but they would say lets have it at a slower pace so that we can absorb it one step at a time.
quite serious but not necessarily fatal. {Note: Mr. Hagon survived and went on to live a long life.