In 1940s, there was no electricity outside towns

Utilities refused to build power lines to farmers

(Back in January of 1982 The Wake Weekly where I was a reporter published a series that began as a simple inquiry into how electricity reached the rural areas outside Wake Forest and Rolesville. “Do you remember when the lights came on?”

Longtime readers of the Wake Weekly may remember the series. It is, after all, their history if they grew up out in Stony Hill or around Falls. But we have welcomed so many new people to this area, and they do not know what happened here 60 or 80 years ago. They do not know that where subdivisions are flourishing now there were farms and small stores at the crossroads, churches and stills, and a different culture.

All the people mentioned in this article and the two parts that will follow are dead, but we must applaud what they did to bring their farms and homes into the 20^th Century.

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During the holidays, Christmas tree lights and candles have sparkled from the homes in and around Wake Forest.

Churches lighted 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 80 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 changed lives all over this nation.

Electricity came to the cities and towns early, soon after Thomas A. Edison built the first electric station in New York City in 1882. Wake Forest got its first lights in 1909 after the town was rechartered in order to sell the necessary bonds. (Louisburg was electrified earlier, in 1908.) The lights were powered by a little Delco direct-current generator fed sometimes by the cast-off wood and sawdust from the planing mill next door. It was housed in the small brick building behind Bright Funeral Home and the words POWER LIGHT are faint but can be seen on the front.

Wake Forest built some electric lines south of town a few years later, and Carolina Power & Light Co., which began to sell power to the town in 1915, had some lines along main roads.

But the lights pretty much stopped at the edge of town. “Here is a college over 100 years old,” said Dr. Thurman Kitchen, president of Wake Forest College 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 country to extend electric service to farms and rural families. In 1935, nine out of 10 farms in the entire country 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 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, Ga., 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, N.Y.

When the Wake Forest electrical 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 outlets they had. The first indoor lines ran along the (planks, boards) in the ceiling, supported on white posts which resembled the spools for thread women used in sewing.

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 life 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. But fireplaces remained the only source of heat, except for cook stoves, in many homes.

Times were hard in 1940. Banks had failed in the early 1930s, 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 what became Wake Electric for many years.

Some farmers started raising chickens, broilers, and they put them in every building they could. But chickens need water, and without electricity every drop of water had to be pumped up and carried to the chickens 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, which was the Pine State Creamery Company in Raleigh begun in 1919.

Hay was thrown down from the hay mow to the milking floor by hand, the cream had to be separated from the milk by hand and the corn for feed had to be shelled in little hand-cranked shellers.

Out in the fields, farmers were still mostly 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-1930s, Pearce said, his wife was drawing all the water and looking after the 800 chickens they were raising 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 (Monday) meant big tubs of water, all drawn by hand, and a washpot filled with boiling water. It meant scrubbing the clothes on a washboard first to loosen and get out the dirt, then scrubbing with lye soap made at home.

“You had to make the soap in the full or the moon or it would draw up on you,” Betty Timberlake said. The lye was dangerous; the process of making soap was 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 out and put in the rinse water, then wrung again and carried to the clothesline. Once they were dry, many had to be ironed with heavy, stove-heated flat irons. No wonder some women called them “sad irons.”

There were no refrigerators, no freezers. In town, people could have ice boxes with the ice delivered every day. But no one delivered ice over the clay roads in the country.

Women not only had to 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. During a hot summer day women would be in the kitchen with boiling water, stoking a wood stove to sterilize the canning jars and do all the canning. Most women made the bread for their families.

A lot of people downplayed the hard work rural life meant at the time. “Everyone lived like that then.”

And most of them remembered fondly the family life, the family fun they had. “We had a good time,” said Mrs. J.P. Bailey, who was one of 10 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 Gazette does not have access to the Wake Electric pictures – most taken by L.K. or Linwood Stephenson – but we can describe them.

The largest was of a wood stove, one owned by Mrs. J.W. Wilson who lived near Wake Forest, showing two coffee pots, two big teakettles, the two warming ovens over the stove and a string of dried peppers hanging on the wall.

Otis Fogg was caught digging into a big pail of food for his six small pigs inside a pen.

Mrs. E.B. Green of Oxford was shown walking with two pails toward a pump in the foreground.)

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