Electricity in P.E.I.'s Bygone Days

Reginald "Dutch"Thompson's column The Bygone Days brings you the voices of Island seniors, many of whom are now long-departed. Thesetales of the way things used to be offer a fascinating glimpse into the past. Every second weekend CBC P.E.I. will bring you one of Dutch's columns.

In many parts of rural P.E.I. it was the 1950s and as late as the 1960s before everyone got electricity to their homes.

"1935 we got electricity," said Hester Linkletter, born in 1907.

She had her son Robert that year in the hospital, where power had not yet been hooked up. When she brought the baby home to Linkletter, P.E.I., her home had been connected and there were suddenly, "bright lights, oh dear what a welcome!"

Kids thought pumping water was fun

Linkletter said the chore she hated the most was cleaning the thin, delicate glass chimneys on the old kerosene lamps.

Coincidentally in the big 1956 ice storm that left P.E.I. without power for months, her son Robert helped put in new poles and run the wire in western P.E.I.

Maude Palmer was born in 1905 and recalls pumping water for the family's animals when the brook was frozen.

"Dad was a smart man. In the wintertime the horses and the cows had to be watered, and he had a little building attached to the shed and a big long-handled pump and a trough outside the building. We'd stay inside the building and pump ... we thought it was fun!"

Fundraisers for electric poles

One enterprising Charlottetown businessman who went on to become very wealthy followed the Maritime Electric trucks to where they were installing electricity. He would leave refrigerators, radios andelectric stoves for folks to try out, no money down. He made a lot of sales that way people were hooked by the convenience of electricity.

But getting power then, as now, was not cheap.

Ella Willis was born in 1910 in Hampshire, P.E.I., andrecalls being allowed to attend fundraisers for neighbours to pay for poles to string the electric and phone wires.

"My father's people were Wesleyans, and there were a lot of things they didn't approve of," Willis said. There was no drinking in the house and her grandmotherburned Ella's playing cards in the woodstove."She told me the devil was in them, and that was it!" Willis said with a chuckle.

She recalled when she was five or six enjoying a fundraiser held in neighbour Hilson Tremere's field for money for the poles to bring electricity to his property.

"They had a sort of a swing that the horse went around and around and made the swing go," Willis said.

A man named Donald MacDonald played the fiddle at all the community's get-togethers, she said. He died tragically in 1914 when he was struck by lightning, she recalled.

"That gentleman was electrocuted on his farm. They were neighbours of ours. He was trying to unhitch the horses and he was in between them. Both the horses and he went," she said. "It's before we had lightning rods. Everybody then got lightning rods on their houses ... it was very sad."

Enough to run a radio

Dutch remembered when his own grandfather got electricity on his farm, he got the bare minimum 15-amp service: that was one 15-amp fuse.

That was enough to run a radio so he could hear the death notices every day at 12:30 p.m., plus one 60-watt lightbulb upstairs and one downstairs.

His grandmother still powered her Singer sewing machine with a foot treadle and their water supply was gravity-fed from a spring out back.

'It was brilliant!'

Lloyd Gates grew up helping his dad Fred run Gates' Mill in West Royalty where they crushed grain and milled flour. The building was four storeysand was a landmark for decades, and was torn down in 1967.

"It was all the barter system, dad would take 10 per cent. He'd weigh the grain and take 10 per cent of it for grinding it all or making it into flour," Gates said.

"He also hooked up a generator one time, just a car generator, and hooked up a six-volt battery to it and had one light. That was really something because usually it was lanterns before that."

West Royalty is now part of Charlottetown but 80 years ago it was very rural Gates said the family's property at the end of North River Road didn't get electricity till 1938 or '39.

"And we had to pay for the poles to come out from the Queen's Arms," Gates said. "I can still remember turning the lights on, the first electric light. It was brilliant!"

'I had to wash every day'

P.E.I. villages like Crapaud, Victoria and Freetown got their first electricity from the local grist mill.

In Breadalbane people had electricity back in the 1920s thanks to the local railroad station agent. Pomroy Murray set up a generator at the sawmill across the road from the railway station, and there was electricity from 6 to 11 p.m. every night and on Monday morning until noon, which was wash day.

Grace Swan was born in Little York, P.E.I., in 1920. After she got married in 1942, she moved to a farm in nearby Covehead where she raised her family.

"I had to wash every day. This is what strikes me so funny: we had to have a tub and a board and hang the clothes out, and we washed every day. Now they have all these conveniences with the automatic washers and the driers, and they're not washing diapers anymore! It's so different," Swan said.

Electricity came to Covehead in 1947, she said, but Swan said the bright lights weren't all good.

"It showed an awful lot of dust on top of the stove!" she said with a laugh.

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