Let There Be Light

This blog posting was actually written  about a month ago but I felt such a great urge to share my “tomato story”, this one was pushed to the side.

I love nostalgia and delight often in the items our local paper chooses to print  in their weekly column called Rewrites. The item that caught my eye this morning (9/7) was an article written 125 years ago.

The date of September 3, 1888 was to mark the electrification of Elko. It would be interesting to research how the town folks readied themselves for this lighting up of their lives but it surely ranked up there with future events like the first radio set in town and then the first TV available. Or maybe by that time, new inventions were becoming blasé

I was raised on a farm in the Midwest but my memory as a child always included having electricity in our home—just not inside plumbing—but that’s another story. However, I have friends (yes, they’re still alive) who remember homes without electricity. That meant going to bed at the same time the chickens did or straining your eyes to read by an oil lamp (although I understand Aladdin lamps gave out very good illumination). Moving from that type of existence to electric lights had to have been a life changing experience—one that very few of us can even imagine. I suppose some Elko folk had gas lights so that adds another twist to the change-over to electrification.

A more recent “Rewrite” column mentioned that the last bastion of non-electrified Elko County was hooked into the grid in the 60’s in the settlement called Midas. The last time we were exploring ghost towns, Midas was our destination but there may still be some people in the are—we just didn’t see any sign of them.

If any of you have memories of your family or relatives living with gas light or oil lamps, please share, particularly if there was an air of excitement in a newly electrified home or place of business.