Looking Back
You Don’t Miss Your Toaster Until Your Well Runs Dry
By JOYCE M. TICE

The old adage “absence makes the heart grow fonder” is never more true than when the electricity goes off. I spend months at a time never thinking of electricity at all, and now I am consumed with thoughts of electricity and coffee and how wonderful both are.

I was awakened abruptly just after midnight by the sudden absence of all the white noise of this seemingly living and breathing house. This 150-year-old building was run entirely without electricity for its first seventy-seven years. The original open hearth was replaced by wood-burning stoves and tallow candles by kerosene lamps.

Mansfield is notable for having played football under electric lights in 1897, but electrification did not reach the masses until much later. In 1897, a Wellsboro Agitator news item reported that “most of the stores in Blossburg are now lighted by electricity.” Also in 1897, it was reported that the “Mansfield Electric Company proposes to light the streets with five 2,000-candlepower lamps and 70 incandescent 16-candlepower lamps at an annual rental of $900 which is $350 more than yearly cost of the kerosene lamps now in use. It will be an all-night service and cover the whole territory of the present kerosene lamps.”

However early electrification came to cities and towns, it came much later for rural areas. In Mansfield, there is a historical marker in front of the Tri-County Electric building. The sign says that, in 1936, seventy-five percent of Pennsylvania farms did not have electricity. In the summer of 1936, my uncle, Homer Tice, and his friend, Frank Beardslee, dug the holes for the electric poles from Lawrence Corners in Rutland Township, through Elk Run, and up to Gray Valley in Sullivan Township. They were young fellows at the time, and they were paid fifty cents a hole. It took them the whole summer. The two nine-foot shovels and the nine-foot crowbar they used are in my museum now.

In October of 1936, my grandfather, who lived in this same house where I now reside, wrote in his diary of working on the lights. I take that to mean wiring in preparation for the utility to come.

On October 27, he mentioned, “Electric lights was turned on.”  Roseville was ahead by a year and a half. On June 25, 1934, Eugene Crippen recorded that “the first electric wires came to Roseville today.” Three days later he wrote, “Electric ‘juice’ for the first time.” These and other diaries can be read on my Web site.

It took no time at all for us to become completely dependent and reliant on this resource. When we lose electricity now, we feel isolated and abandoned. Our functional lives come to a halt, and we don’t know what to do.

Once daylight came, I started to pace from one end of the house to the other, thinking about coffee. My good neighbor, the farmer next door with the generator, called to check on me and I told him I could get along just fine if I could plug my coffeemaker in at his milk house for a few minutes.

Having done that, I returned home and continued to pace, coffee mug in hand, thinking of the still-dropping temperature. Sometime after nine, the magic moment arrived. All the white noise returned at once in a jolt. The doorbell rang as it does when the “juice” is restored. All three dogs ran barking to greet the new arrival. The two cats fled in the opposite direction from the unseen intruder. Pandemonium broke out in full force, and I was reunited with the civilized world once again.

Electricity and coffee are fine things, indeed.

Joyce M. Tice is the creator of the Tri-Counties Genealogy and History. You can contact her at lookingback@mountainhomemag.com.