Brilliant_ The Evolution of Artificial Light - Jane Brox [73]
Yet to turn to the American countryside in 1920 was to part ways with progress. At the time, there were about 6.5 million farms in the United States. Fewer than 100,000 of them were connected to central stations, and most of those were located in small northeastern states near cities, or on the West Coast, where irrigation spurred the development of electric lines. And farmers who were connected to high lines could pay twice as much as city dwellers for service. The lack of electricity only exacerbated the diminishing power of the countryside. Young men and women had been steadily leaving the farms during the past century; by 1920 the depopulation of the countryside reached a point where, for the first time in history, the number of those living on farms and in towns with a population of less than 2,500 was smaller than the urban and suburban population of the United States, which stood at 54 percent. Those actually living on farms (as distinct from those living in small towns) accounted for less than a third of the U.S. population, which meant less money was directed to rural areas for education and health and social services.
The situation would only worsen during the next decade. The high demand for food during World War I had given farmers the incentive to increase cultivated acreage and intensify production. When demand fell off after the war, the markets collapsed, and the price farmers could get for their crops plummeted. With mortgages and loan payments to make, farmers were reluctant to reduce their production, and the continued overproduction of crops only ensured that prices would remain low. Many rural areas fell into a depression a full decade before the stock market crash of 1929.
Invisible beyond the glare, the unending, backbreaking work of farm life continued unabated: "There was no quittin' time and no startin' time—it was all the time." Less than 3 percent of farmers owned tractors; most continued to work their fields with horses, which meant they were still devoting a share of their land to raising feed for draft animals—five acres of oats and hay for each horse. Without electricity, farmers had to haul water for their livestock by hand, and they had to milk their cows by hand, sometimes in the dark—an open flame presented too high a risk in the barn. "You could milk a cow in the dark, but there were a lot of things around a barn you couldn't do in the dark.... And that was terrible, to work around a barn with the explodable things—the hay and dust and so forth—with a lantern," recalled one proponent of rural electrification. A farmer from Texas commented, "Winter mornings it would be so dark ... you'd think you were in a box with the lid shut."
The bottlers required that milk be kept at 50 degrees before pickup. If it wasn't, they rejected it, saying it was good only for pigs. Without refrigeration, farmers had to haul their milk to a stream or a well to keep it cool, or they packed it on ice. New England farmers had cooler weather in summer, and they could cut ice in winter and store it in sawdust, but Southern farmers had to buy ice, which was expensive, and it melted quickly in the extreme heat, even when buried in sawdust.
The lack of central station electric power didn't affect all farms equally. The more prosperous and progressive-minded farmers modernized as they could, independent of the grid. Some generated power with the help of steam engines, windmills, and waterwheels, and in 1912, with the advent of Delco electric plants, which were gasoline-powered generators, more farmers found a little ease. Though expensive