Utilities refused to extend power lines to farmers
(This series about how electric power reached the rural areas around Wake Forest was first published in “The Wake Weekly” in 1982 and again in 2000.
Last week the editor was a member of a panel discussing the area history, part of the Leadership Wake Forest program, and others on the panel asked that this series be published again in the Gazette.
Many longtime readers will remember it. After all, it is their history. But we are welcoming many new people to the area, and they do not know what happened 20, 40 or 60 years ago. It never hurts to recall the past. It gives us an idea of where we have been.
A great number of the people quoted in this and the next two installments are no longer with us, but we have left the quotes and the references as they were in 1982 and 1983 though information has been added in parentheses to clarify a location or a reference.)
During the holidays, Christmas tree lights and candles have sparkled from the homes around Wake Forest.
Churches alight night after night revealed congregations holding special services.
Down rural road after rural road, passing motorists could catch glimpses of families enjoying the holidays with family dinners, by watching television specials or by telephoning distant relatives.
But there are still many people who can remember Christmases 40 years ago or more.
Had you gone down those same rural roads at Christmas in 1940, most of the roads would have been clay ruts, and the only lights feeble rays from kerosene lanterns.
This is the story of a revolution that has changed lives all over this country.
Electricity came to the cities and town early, soon after Thomas A. Edison built the first electric station in New York City in 1882. Wake Forest got its first lights in 1910, a year after the town was rechartered as the Town of Wake Forest. (It had been the Town of Wake Forest College.) The lights were powered by a Westinghouse generator, boiler and engine that was sometimes fueled by sawdust from the planing mill across the railroad tracks. The town built some electric lines south of town in the next few years, and Carolina Power & Light Company, which began to sell power to the town in 1915, had some lines along main roads.
But the lights stopped pretty much at the edge of town. “Here is a college over 100 years old,” Dr. Thurman Kitchin, president of Wake Forest College, said in 1940, “and yet we look around the college community and see kerosene lamps almost to the city limits of town.”
At that time there were no efforts here or in the rest of the county to extend electric service to farms and rural families. In 1935, nine out of 10 farms in the entire county had no electricity.
“Well, I remember before we got lights we were in the dark,” said Worth Pearce, who farmed west of Wake Forest all his life. When Pearce was young, Jethro Clowes, who lived down the road, had CP&L power, Pearce said, and Pearce’s father tried to get the company to extend its lines.
At that time CP&L (and other utilities) were quoting prices of $2,000 to $3,000 a mile to build the lines, a cost the farmer would have to pay even though the utility would still own the lines.
“It was a right big thing, and he didn’t think he could afford it,” Pearce said. “CP&L could have run us the lines, but they wouldn’t.”
During the 1920s and 1930s utility companies said farmers would not use enough electricity to justify the expense of the lines. And it was more expensive to build lines where customers were farther apart. Some people worried that once farmers had electricity they would get into debt and lose their farms.
Electric rates were high. When Franklin D. Roosevelt went to Warm Springs, Georgia in 1924 for therapy for his polio, he found it cost 18 cents a kilowatt for the lights in his cottage, four times what electricity cost at his home in Hyde Park, New York.
When the Wake Forest system first began, the cost was $1 a month for a 15-watt light. Commissioner Guy Hill, who served as the town’s director of utilities for over 20 years, said customers were charged on the number of drops (outlets) they had.
Farmers were trying to make their lives better, and they knew that meant electricity.
“I had a dream of electricity back when I was a kid,” said Linwood Stephenson, who was to work all his adult years in rural electrification. He was going to dam up the creek on the family farm west of Wake Forest and run a line up to the house. “It was just a dream.”
Some farmers, like Worth Pearce’s father, installed generators that helped some. But fireplaces remained the only source of heat, except for cook stoves, in many homes.
Times were hard in 1940. Banks had failed (two in Wake Forest and one in Youngsville), taking many families’ savings. Cotton prices were low and cotton had been the cash crop on most farms around Wake Forest, especially west of town. “The boll weevil came along and took the cotton, and land just went to the bottom in price,” said J.L. Shearon, who headed up Wake Electric for many years.
Some farmers started raising chickens, broilers, and they put them in every building they could find. But chickens need water, and without electricity every drop of water had to be pumped and carried by hand.
Bervin Woodlief calculated that 500 chickens would use 200 gallons of water a day. He had 10,000 chickens at the time.
“We toted a lot of water.” The pump was 50 to 100 yards from the nearest chicken house, and he had two or three houses at any one time, all full of thirsty chickens.
Every farm had some cows, and there were even a few small dairies with 50 cows or so in the area. You got up early to milk the cows then, before dawn, and did the night milking after dark most of the year. Kerosene lanterns were banned from some barns because of the fear of fire.
“I’ve milked many a morning when I had to go out and feel if the cow was in the stall,” Stephenson said. “You milked by feel. I had to have that tender touch.”
Then the milk had to be taken to the spring, if the farm was fortunate enough to have a spring as the Stephensons did, or to a pond or creek – anywhere the water could keep the milk cool. Dairies had to send their milk to the plant every day. (Pine State Creamery, which opened in Raleigh in 1919, made large dairy farms profitable if they had electricity. It gave small dairies an income stream.)
Hay was thrown down by hand, the cream had to be separated from the milk by hand, and the corn in feed had to be shelled in little hand-cranked shellers. Out in the fields, most farmers were still using horses or mules.
All of farming was hard, manual labor. “Drawing the water and cutting the wood” were the hardest jobs, Woodlief said.
“I think how much better it was for us menfolks after we got electricity,” Pearce said, “but I think it was most beneficial for the womenfolks.”
In the mid-30s, Pearce said, his wife was drawing all the water and looking after the 800 chickens as well as doing all the housework and looking after the family.
Stephenson remembered his mother, who raised seven children and for years washed all their clothes by hand. “I wonder that she survived.”
Wash day meant big tubs of water, all drawn by hand, and a washpot filled with boiling water often over an open fire outside. It meant scrubbing the clothes on a washboard first to loosen and get out the dirt, and scrubbing with lye soap made at home.
“You had to make the soap in the full of the moon or it would draw up on you,” Betty Timberlake said. The lye was dangerous: the process of making soap tedious. You had to stand over a hot stove; you had to get all the lumps out.
Once the clothes were scrubbed, they had to be wrung out and put into the boiling water and then stirred to get out all the dirt. Then they had to be wrung again and put into the rinse water, then wrung again and carried to the clothesline, all in the hot sun in summer, the cold wind in winter. After the clothes were dry, many like men’s white shirts for church and women’s dresses of all kinds had to be ironed with heavy, stove-heated flat irons.
There were no refrigerators, no freezers. In town, people had ice boxes with the ice delivered every day. But no one delivered ice over the clay roads in the country.
Women had to not only prepare three meals a day on wood stoves for large families, they had to keep a large garden and can the produce each summer for the next winter’s meals. Most women made their own bread.
A lot of people who were interviewed downplayed the hard work rural life meant at the time. “We just didn’t know any better,” several people said. “Everyone lived like that
then.”
Most of them remember fondly the family life, the family fun, they had.
“We had a good time,” said Mrs. J.P. Bailey, who was one of ten children. “We are still enjoying each other. I’m glad there were ten of us.”
Most families were large, and people did manage. “I don’t see how my father fed us all and clothed us,” Stephenson said. There were seven children.
His father, Jim, loved to be asked how he managed. “When the first one came along, I raked and scraped, and it took all I had,” he would say. “When the seventh one came along, I was still raking and scraping, and I couldn’t tell the difference.”
(Next week, how strong leaders brought the lines out to the farms.)
(The pictures that illustrated the article in 2000 were from Wake Electric’s archives and were Mrs. J.W. Wilson’s wood cook stove with its warming ovens above, firebox and ash box on one side, a small oven in the middle, a water reservoir on the side and a cooktop with kettles and a coffee pot; Otis Fogg leaning on a wooden gate holding a tub with feed for the pigs he was watching; and Mrs. E.B. Green of Oxford carrying her gallon pails to the pump (pictured) for more water for her chickens.)
