Oh, Glow! The Big 4-0!
By Cindy Davis Meixel

Home.
Coming home. 
“Coming home” often equates to a place where the light is left on long after dark—a welcome beacon guiding the weary traveler to safe and comforting quarters.

In Wellsboro, the lights are always left on to greet residents, returning natives, and tired tourists (many of whom turn into future residents).
For 40 years now, Wellsboro’s gaslights have stood like a long line of silent ambassadors, standing guard and casting their glow.

Over the years, the gaslights have become the symbol of the town. They’ve evolved into tradition and trademark, not to mention the logo of the local chamber of commerce.

“People identify with the gaslights in Wellsboro,” says Mary Worthington, executive secretary/treasurer of Growth Resources of Wellsboro (GROW). “When you say ‘Wellsboro,’ people say, ‘Oh, the community with the gaslights!’”
While no hard facts can be found, Wellsboro officials are certain the town is one of the few in the Northeast—not to mention the nation—basking in the glow of gaslights.

With this 40th birthday year, the gaslights along the borough’s main boulevards have now been in place for the same length of time as their predecessor electric lamps.

Scott Gitchell, county historian and director of the Tioga County Historical Society, says the conduits for the electric lamps were placed in late 1927. The lamps were likely installed the following year, possibly in preparation for the town’s centennial celebration in 1930.

Newspaper reports and other documentation of both community enhancements—the addition of the electric lamps in the late ’20s as well as the conversion to the gaslights in the late ’60s—are scant.

Neither “the addition of the electric lamps” nor the installation of the gas lamps made “too much of a fanfare in the (press),” Gitchell notes, agreeing that often the significance of certain historical events are not realized until many years have passed.

Gitchell says the electric light poles along Wellsboro’s main street were taller than their gaslight counterparts. They may have initially been a dark green, and were also painted silver at one point.

“In my opinion, the electric lamps were equally as attractive as the gaslights,” Gitchell says, adding that the difference in lighting between the two was obvious. “I remember the first time I saw the gaslights how much darker it was on Main Street. It was noticeably darker in town.”

Of course, that diminishment in lumens is what further illuminated Wellsboro’s downtown charm.

“We could’ve lit the town up like New York City, but (the borough officials) didn’t want that,” says Jack Rymell, once district manager for the former North Penn Gas Company, the utility in charge of installing the gaslights.
Rymell says he was approached by the borough, asking him to investigate the possibility of converting the electric lamps to gas. He acquired two gaslights from Charmglow, a company based in Illinois at the time, and set to work experimenting with the lights.

At the North Penn Gas service center, Rymell and the now late Bob Maynard, a fellow gas company employee, experimented at nighttime with the lights, which were connected to a bottle gas tank, and a light meter.

“We figured out how far to separate them, how much light they should give off, and so forth,” Rymell explains, adding that they also walked the town, taking meter readings on the electric lamps, which, he says, gave off an inconsistency of light in both brightness and color tone.

Approval for the conversion was given in 1967 and the lights were installed the following year. Also during that time, the town’s boulevards were being narrowed, so both revamping projects fit well together.

“Actually, our part of the work went quite quickly,” says Rymell, who was 38 years old at the time he worked to install the gaslights. “We did one boulevard at a time. We ran the gas lines and poured footings, then the next day we’d come back and set the lights.”

Rymell says the gaslights originally belonged to the gas company, which then gave them to the community and charged the borough $24 per light per year.

John E. Dugan, former borough secretary and long-time borough council member, can’t recall if the bright idea of the gaslights came from one particular individual; he believes it was more of a collective discussion among borough officials.

“We thought it would be a nice thing to do in a town this size,” Dugan explains. “Many thought it would be quaint and unique, something different than what people had seen before. A lot of people talked about the charm of it.”
To complement the more subdued lighting, store owners were eventually encouraged to leave their window lights on longer at night because “it was felt it would add to the ambiance,” says R. James Dunham, retired president of Dunham’s.

Before and after the conversion, lively debate was stirred in the community between those preferring the electric lamps and those favoring the gaslights. Of course, the latter side won out.

The gaslights also faced a more formidable opponent—the state of Pennsylvania, which threatened to turn them off at the height of the energy crisis in 1979.
In an effort to keep the mantles alight, Worthington, then executive director of the Wellsboro Area Chamber of Commerce, says the borough gathered up reams of documented support in media coverage as well as letters from townspeople and tourists lauding the beauty and importance of the gaslights.

The town also hosted Susan M. Shanaman, the chairman of the state’s Public Utilities Commission at the time. “She came to town and fell in love with the gaslights and the whole community,” Worthington notes, adding that the borough was then permitted to maintain its gaslights, but those used for commercial and private use were forced to convert to electric.

Even today, some of the borough’s gaslights that are located in less noticeable areas away from the main boulevards and streets are being converted to electric. Susan L. Stephens, borough secretary/treasurer, says seven gaslights at the Pearl Street parking lot were recently converted to electric, and six more in the Crafton Street parking lot are slated for conversion.

Stephens says 133 gaslights are currently owned by the borough and are most prominently seen on the Main Street and Central Avenue boulevards and along other key streets. The gaslights on The Green, in the center of town, are owned and maintained by the county.

Musing on the glowing 40-year history of the gaslights, Stephens concludes, “It probably changed our town and turned it into the destination that it is today,” the community warmed by the light of tradition.

Cindy Davis Meixel, a native of Wellsboro, is a regular contributor to Mountain Home and author of a short play titled Gaslight Dreams. The play, which stars two humorous—and philosophically reflective—gaslights, is performed at community events.