Each winter as the days get shorter and shorter, I find two things happening. One, we go to bed earlier and earlier, and two, I wonder all over again how people ever got along without electric lights. It’s hard to imagine Vicksburg, or any village, without electricity and municipal water, but they were not part of everyday life until nearly 1900.
Incandescent lamps were developed as early as 1840, but they were not commercially successful, partly because there was no reliable source of electricity to power them. However, when Thomas Edison developed a carbon filament lamp in 1879, he took the next logical step. Edison built the world’s first central electric power plant, Edison Electric Illuminating Company, in New York City, making practical use of electrical lighting possible.
Word traveled fast, and it wasn’t long before everyone was thinking about Edison’s magical lights and the new and exciting possibilities opened up by the amazing thing called electricity. However, if a city, town or village decided they wanted to enjoy the benefits of electrical lights, they had to build their own generating plant to produce their own power.
- Vicksburg’s light and water plant on North Main Street, ca. 1920.
Initially, the principle benefit of electricity to villages like Vicksburg was thought to be in the area of street lighting. Darkness came early during fall and winter evenings, and local merchants were open until 8 or 9 p.m. every night. My father was raised in Scotts and could remember walking “uptown” with his foster parents in the evening and seeing as many as two dozen lighted lanterns lined up along the curb next to the street in front of the various stores. People were inside – where more kerosene lamps were lit – doing a little shopping, while their “flashlight” waited for them outside on the sidewalk. And this was around 1910, long after larger villages like Vicksburg, had become electrified.
Before electricity, kerosene street lamps were used in Vicksburg providing some illumination, but the appeal of electricity was clear enough. No need to employ a village lamplighter and no more glass chimneys to buy, keep clean, and have broken regularly by small boys with stones in their pockets. Plus, electric lamps provided a much brighter, more dependable light.
Mendon was the first small community in this area to install an electric light plant, and many Vicksburg residents traveled south to help them celebrate the new modern marvel in the summer of 1895. The Vicksburg Commercial reported, “The electric light is, so far, a success, their having put in a $10,000 plant. They are to furnish not less than ten arc lights for street lighting at $5.00 per month, or $60.00 per year.” The paper then asked the inevitable question, “If Mendon can afford electric lights, why can’t Vicksburg?”
Why not, indeed. It was thought by most that perhaps Vicksburg could, and should, have not only electric lights, but a municipal water system, too, for the safety of all its residents. Most homes and many commercial buildings were of frame construction, and fires caused by knocked-over kerosene lamps and unattended heating stoves were all too frequent. Adequate fire protection was a constant concern of all property owners.
Vicksburg had been talking about some type of municipal water system since 1892. Businesses and residences, like their rural cousins, relied on individual wells and cisterns for their water source. Vicksburg’s first Hook and Ladder Company, organized and operational sometime prior to 1879, was dependent on a series of cisterns and ponds for the collection of rain water to be pumped into the fire apparatus with one of J. E. Kimble’s steam engines. However, if the summer had been dry, there might not be sufficient water available when needed. And, if the winter was cold, the engine’s valves could freeze, not to mention the fact that cisterns and ponds froze, too. Most people felt it was definitely time for Vicksburg to “modernize” by having its own water and light plant.
Finally, in February of 1896, a meeting was called to discuss the two needs, and by April a move was afoot to put the whole idea before the voters. Bond issues were approved in an election, but a group of residents who had campaigned against all this new fangled nonsense, managed to get the vote declared illegal on a technicality. However, a determined Village Council submitted the question to the voters a second time. They were vindicated when both bond issues were subsequently carried by a comfortable two-thirds majority.
By July a spot near the railroad on North Main Street was picked for “The Plant”. In August the Commercial reported, “The Village Council are (sic) well pleased with the electric system designed by the engineers and for the small appropriation which will light our village in a first class manner and leave plenty of capacity for stores and dwellings.”
Work on “the plant” continued at a fast pace. By late fall, light poles were erected and wires strung. In December of 1896, a meeting was held in Corporation Hall to organize a hose team and fire department. By the end of December, the water works received its final test, and leaky joints were repaired. With water pressure at 150 pounds per square inch, the Water Works was declared ready for business, signaling the beginning of the end of the pump and outhouse era, at least for those living in town.
Soon the electric dynamos arrived and were placed in position. The Commercial reported in its January 8, 1897 issue, “The electric lights started last night and gave good satisfaction, giving a clear, steady light with very little flicker. Everybody seems well satisfied with the light and there is little doubt but what we have a good plant. The streets were lighted up and look quite citified.” By later in the year, about 100 families had electricity in their homes, and the incandescent line was being extended way out to the Depot.
But it took Franklin D. Roosevelt’s Rural Electrification Act of 1935 to light up both the rural landscape and smaller towns like Scotts and Fulton, which lacked the resources to install their own electric generating plants.
The REA paved the way for the establishment of large companies like Consumers Power and electrical cooperatives like Fruitbelt and others. They all quickly began erecting poles and running wires to the rural areas. The farmhouse in which I grew up was electrified in 1936 by three men assigned by Consumers to canvass thatparticular area, signing up as many farmers as possible for hookup to the “high wire”. Once all the agreements were signed, these same men then traveled around and did all the necessary wiring in each house and outbuilding, and connected them to the roadside line.
As with most farm families, it was light in the cow barn and electricity for the cream separator that most interested my father. Electricity in the cow barn meant freedom from dangerous kerosene lights, and bothersome battery systems, while making it possible to dream about labor-saving devices like the electric milking machine.
Light in the house was nice, too, but experience with electrical appliances was limited, and no one could imagine any need for more than a single central ceiling fixture and maybe a couple of wall outlets per room. Even these would not be used right away; they were “just in case” you eventually decided to replace all the oil lamps with electric models. And trade in the wood cook stove for an electric model? No way! How would you keep the house warm without the wood stove? Besides, there was plenty of wood for the taking, so why pay for electricity?
I’ve often wondered just how much it cost for the first electric hook-up and the two chandeliers that still hang – and work – in our daughter’s house today. The three “electric men” roomed and boarded with our family during the three or four weeks they were working in the area, so it probably didn’t cost much. Every time Kathy turns on those two lights, I think about my ancestors – and yours – who, along with the chickens, got up and went to bed with the sun, and had to fit their daily work into those all-too-short daylight hours of winter.
Small Town Memories 