Electricity Arrives!

Electricity Arrives!                                                    

            Electricity coming to the area was exciting news!  I remember well watching the men cut a swath through the forest and running utility poles and lines to our house.  This would have been in late 1948 or early in 1949.  From my research, electricity apparently came to Breckinridge and Grayson counties in Kentucky through the Meade County REA.  (History. On May 11, 1935, President Franklin Delano Roosevelt issued Executive Order 7037, which created the Rural Electrification Administration. In 1936, the Congress endorsed Roosevelt's action by passing the Rural Electrification Act.) 

            I also remember how Mom and Dad were not sure if they could pay for electricity.  All their lives and all my life to that point (six or seven years) we had used kerosene lamps for light and wood for heating and cooking.  Could we afford this new source of energy?  My parents were legitimately concerned.     

Though not directly referring to the coming of electricity here is what Mom records after Dad returned home from his stint in the U. S. Navy:

            Life and farming continued for us with prices getting better because of the war.  Tobacco    began to bring higher prices and we managed to pay the farm debt off several years ahead of time.  Even with the war worries, the economy was better for us.  We bought a refrigerator, washing machine, car and a pump to bring the water from the spring into the house.  With the car, we began to need a better road and began to wish for a place    closer to a paved road.

            I handed Dad tools as he hooked up the pump in the cellar of the house.  I watched as he ran pipe from the house to the spring.  Running water!  At last we could pump water right into the kitchen sink.  And a refrigerator!   No longer storing the milk and butter in the spring water to keep them cool.  And a washing machine!  Mom held on to the scrub board "just in case."

            The washer left an impression on me literally.  Once I was helping her feed the washed clothes through the wringer.  The wringer was the two rolls built on top of the washing machine.  They turned in toward each other so one could press the water out of the clothes before hanging them out to dry.  No spin drying then, just an old-fashioned wringer washing machine.  One day my left fingers got caught in the wringer and before Mom could get the machine stopped my arm was half way into the wringer.  I haven't liked washing clothes since!          

            Electricity was magic to us--the power to run the pump, the washing machine, and the lights.  My Aunt Mabel Pryor recounts a time when a man testified in church that the next best thing to his relationship to God was electricity!  However, overshadowing all the joy was the constant complaint from Dad not to leave the lights on or to run the water too much, etc.