From a email correspondent who wishes to remain anonymous:
show details 6:22 PM (16 hours ago) Reply
What year did you move into the farm house? We didn't get electricity at the old home place until around 1948. I recall one of the first things mother and dad bought was a used refrigerator. I thought that was the most amazing thing. I was fascinated by the little light inside that came on each time you opened the frig door. The first day I almost wore it out. Mother kept scolding me to stop opening the door. She said it would make it use too much electricity and would burn out the light bulb. I remember the only item in the frig for a day or so, was some oleo. (remember the white stuff that came with an orange tablet that had to be stirred in the oleo to make it yellow? ) I always thought the white stuff tasted like lard, but MAGIC....once the orange tablet was added, it tasted so good...
6 comments:
Good Story!!
In 1948 My Dad purchased the place on the highway just east of the Caney River Bridge.It was our 1st house with Electricity. The First thing my Dad did was put a Telephone in because he was not going to be without a Phone.
The last place that we had no electricity was on a farm between Cambridge and Moline. (We also had no "modern" conveniences ... but I enjoyed so much my second grade of country school.)
While I have no direct experience with the "pre-electric" era, since we were "townies," both of my grandparents lived on farms without electricity. In the White household, there was wood and coal oil for light and heat and in the Call household there was natural gas from the wells my uncles drilled on the place. The gas lights ran day and night, winter and summer, and the gas stoves ran all winter. My uncles collected "casing head gas" to burn in their vehicles from the natural gas.
I remember in the fall when my dad and I along with several male relatives went out to the woods to cut wood for the winter. We did it all in one day and the cutting and splittiing of the firewood would go on for a week or two afterwards.
I'm another "townie", but I recall in my rural friends houses, the "coal oil" (kerosene) lamps. If you had Coleman lamps and lanterns you had pretty good light. I don't remember for sure how they worked. I think there was a little pump to make positive pressure in the tank and there were cup shaped fabric burners/wicks which glowed brightly but didn't burn up. Maybe someone could explain the phenomenom better?
For several years when we would visit my grandparents the house was fairly dark with the kerosene lamps, but they, miraculously as Don said, got Coleman type lanterns and it was the difference between night and day.
When we moved to the farm and got electricity, we still had a frig that ran on natural gas. It was years before I understood how burning gas could make something cold.
It is interesting how a little email from someone who wants to remain anonymous could produce so many comments about such a mundane topic as electricity.
WATER: At our house we always took water pretty much for granted. You turned the tap and city water flowed out, purified and clear and tasty.(But, unfortunately for our teeth, there was no fluoride). At grandma Neill's house there were two sources of water. One was a cistern under the kitchen which collected the water that ran off the dirty roof during a rainstorm. To me, that water did not taste good. The second source was water pumped out of the ground by the windmill out by the barn. That water tasted really good. The taste may have come from the cow urine and feces that filtered down through the ground?????
We had a filter for the cistern that we used for our drinking water. (The filter was cheese cloth over the spout which filtered the bugs.) Though they were thwarted by the system they certainly allowed their presence by each drop of water passing by their captive little bodies.
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