Wake Electric began operations with three employees in WF’s Town Hall
By Carol Pelosi
(This series of three articles was first published in 1984 and the dates in the article are based on 1984.)
It had been almost sixty years since people in North Carolina’s cities and towns began to get electric service, but once rural families around Wake Forest had the chance to get electricity, they signed up pretty quickly.
The first local meeting was early in February of 1940, and the news about the new cooperative had to be carried from house to house, store to store, by men who also had to continue to work their own farms to feed their families.
But by April of 1940, 317 families in Wake, Franklin, Durham, Granville and Vance counties had paid their $5 and signed applications. Members of those families met, we do not know where, and elected nine incorporators – J.R. Wiggins, E.C. Hunt, J.P. Bailey, E.L. Conyers, W.P. Woodlief, L.N. Rogers, V.B. Snipes, W.G. Mangum and J.T. Shearon. These men were later elected the cooperative’s first board of directors, and most of them were to serve for many years.
The next step was to apply to the state authority for permission to ask the Rural Electrification Administration for the loan.
Finally, in May, J.L. Shearon, the first manager, J.P. Bailey and L.N. Rogers went to Washington, D.C., with the completed application. The approval of a loan of $325,000 was announced in August. Some of that money was to build 132 miles of line to serve the original 317 homes; $200,000 was held until maps could be drawn up for 250 more miles to serve about 750 waiting members. Nash and Johnston counties were also added to the cooperative’s charter.
Shearon, who said he really had no idea about getting into the electric business until about then, opened up an office in one room at the top of the stairs in the then-Wake Forest Town Hall, which is now a substation for the Wake Forest Police Department.
A few months later the town added the one-story addition to town hall, and that was to be Wake Electric’s office until 1950, when the cooperative constructed a building on Wait Avenue. (Currently Wake Electric’s headquarters and operations center are in Youngsville, its customer service component is in the large new building on North Franklin Street and it leases the Wait Avenue building to a private company.)
There were three employees – “. . . a lineman, a bookkeeper and me,” Shearon said. George Morbley was the first lineman, and James Hall and Ira D. (Shorty) Lee soon joined the crew. Lee was to be line superintendent for many years.
The new cooperative, like the others starting up across the country, had to find and hire experienced people to work on the lines. “I never had any training in electricity,” Shearon said, though he had attended N.C. State for two years.
Lee had been part of the initial construction crew, and he was hired by Wake Electric on his birthday, Sept. 9, 1941. For many years, until he left in 1959, Lee was the only lineman. “Me and Leonard did all the construction and maintenance. I read every one of those meters by myself every month for years and years.”
Lee said the cooperative had only 342 members when he was hired.
REA could help the new cooperative in many ways, including new standards for building. Utilities at that time over-built their lines and poles. “Battleship construction” it was called, said James Hubbard, manager of N.C. Electric Membership Corporation Inc. REA introduced “barebones” construction, making building the lines much less expensive.
But it did have its drawbacks. “It could thunder in Alabama, and one of those rural lines would go out,” Lee said. He’d have to crank up the truck and head into the country on dirt roads to find and repair the break, usually in the dark and rain and often getting stuck. A farmer would come along and pull him out, then invite him for breakfast.
Out in the countryside, all those customers had to wire their houses and barns and buy electrical appliances at a time when money was very short.
Wake Electric borrowed $10,000 from REA to lend to its members. Lee said the cooperative also bought 100 refrigerators and sold them on the installment plan for $80 each. He had to service the refrigerators, and all but one had to have major repairs. “I put four or five compressors in several of them.”
“We put in a bathroom,” Bervin Woodlief remembers, “and we bought a refrigerator and a stove. We still have the same refrigerator. We got it for $139.95 from Jones Hardware.”
Meanwhile, Carolina Power & Light, like private utilities across the country, was fighting the cooperative. “They fought us every way they could,” said Worth Pearce. One way was to start building lines in the middle of the cooperative’s territory – spite lines, they were called. The first utility in a neighborhood can claim the territory. “I know they did this on (N.C.) 98.”
By mid-March 1941 the first 141 miles of line were completed. Lee said those first lines were built “. . . just as close to Wake Forest as it could be.”
On March 22, 1941, members gathered in the auditorium at the Wake Forest High School (now the elementary school) for the big day. The program was broadcast over WRAL radio, and then most members went out to the substation south of town to watch while the switch was thrown.
That first substation was just one pole with several crossbars. It held three 100-KVA transformers.
“It was a great day when electric service was energized out there,” Stephenson said.
After 42 years, Woodlief can remember the date instantly. “We got electricity on April 12, 1941. E.C. Hunt got it a few days earlier.”
Lois Barham, L.N. Rogers’ daughter, stayed home from school the day electricity came to the family home. In her diary she wrote that the lights went on in the house at five minutes to three on March 25, 1941.”
Mrs. Barham remembers how tight money was then. Her father sold eggs to Jo Williams, who operated the Wake Forest College cafeteria which stood where there is now a seminary parking lot at the intersection of South Main Street and South Avenue. The only spanking she remembers getting, she said, was when her father found her under the house one day, breaking eggs into a churn to make a childish version of a cake.
Because a lot of people couldn’t afford the $5 membership fee or the $2 monthly bill, some generous people helped them – and the money was repaid.
Work on the lines and wiring homes continued through 1941. “So many people wouldn’t join at first,” Pearce said, “but when they began to run the lines, they wanted to know why they weren’t getting electricity too.”
Along with providing the current, Wake Electric began education projects that continued for many years. With the help of model kitchens, home economists showed women how best to use their new appliances. The cooperative sponsored tours to show farmers new work-saving methods and machines in use on other farms.
By December 1941, over 500 families had lights in their homes and barns. Then the Japanese attacked Pearl Harbor, America entered World War II and construction for Wake Electric had to halt.
The war also stopped production of appliances. Shearon had married Edith just three weeks before the war began. They had electricity in their house, but Mrs. Shearon remembers she couldn’t buy a washing machine. She scrubbed the diapers for two babies by hand.
In fact, it was not until the early 1950s that a lot of rural people, both here and across the nation, could get electricity. But the groundwork – the legislation, the hard work, the cooperatives – were ready to serve the people because of what some outstanding men did in the 1930s and early 1940s.
Worth Pearce thought about the men he knew – Kearns, Shearon, Stephenson, Bailey. “They took a giant step, as far as I’m concerned.”
(This is the end of the series. The pictures for this printed version in the Wake Weekly in 1948 and 2000 were of L.E. Creech of Durham shown with his new electric milking system; a casual photo of J.L. Shearon, the first Wake Electric manager; a picture of the cooperative’s first truck outside the addition to the Wake Forest’s town hall which was the cooperative’s first office with either George Morbley or James Hall leaning on it; and Ira D. (Shorty) Lee looking at one of the “bare-bones” substations.)
(Wake Electric Membership Corporation is today one of the state’s fastest-growing cooperative and now has more than 50,000 meters in Wake, Durham, Franklin, Vance, Granville, Johnston and Nash counties. More than half of the residents of Wake Forest receive their power from Wake Electric.
(Its headquarters – the operations center with the trucks, warehouse, finance office – is in Youngsville and have been for several decades. Wake Electric has a customer service center on South Franklin Street in Wake Forest and leases its former headquarters on Wait Avenue.)
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