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By Root 939 0

for them," one recalled. "They was a little afraid you know. They didn't know anything about it. So you go, there's nothin' to it, just turn the switch on and you've got it, see. And so I turned the light on, oh my gosh, look at that. We've never had it that way—you can see all around the room." Another said, "I've seen this happen—the lights come on—hundreds of places, and its an emotional situation you can't describe.... Something happens, lightning strikes them and they all at once are different. People prayed, they cried, they swore."

What of kerosene, which for a brief time had seemed the democratic perfection of light? In memory, some children will fondly recall the oil lamp in the kitchen after supper or the lantern moving across the yard as their father returned from his chores, but few wish to return to those days. When one co-op in Pennsylvania finally strung their lines, they held a mock funeral for a kerosene lamp: "Buried here May 3, 1941 by the Adams Electric Cooperative as a symbol of the drudgery and toil which its member-families bore far longer than was necessary or right but which, with the energization of their own power system, are now abolished for all time." Mock funerals were held in other communities as well. Elsewhere, farmers and their wives were content simply to smash their lanterns on the ground.

Rural people were used to being self-sufficient—repairing their own plows, saving their own seed—but electricity was a mystery, and electricity manuals for farmers reflected the old bewilderment: "What is electricity?...No one today knows the exact answer. All that is actually known is that this powerful energy is present in the world, and that it has been 'harnessed' so it can be used as a safe, tireless and efficient servant of mankind." And now, like city people, they were tied to a vast network. When a quiet winter rain fell and the temperature dropped and ice built up on the wires—and on the tree limbs hanging over the wires—they'd hear the sound of cracking, like rifle shots, and catch the scent of pine, then darkness would overcome them once again. Their electric milking machines stood useless in the pitch-black barn; the heat was gone in the chicken coops and incubators. As one farmer observed, "All this pushbutton stuff. Well, it becomes a part of you. You can't cook a meal without it; you can't take a bath without it; you can't get a drink of water without it.... There you are, you're hooked.... [Before if] you had an Aladdin lamp you could light it and have a good light and go right on about your business, see, but you're hooked when the power goes off."

Electricity meant that the children of farmers would be different people. Not only would they do better in school once they began studying by electric light, but it would carry them into a different world: "To a farm girl who has been brought up with many electrical conveniences it is like listening to a fairy tale to be told that once rural homes did not have electricity."

Sometimes electricity did give a farm more possibilities. "I would never have believed what it has meant," said one farmer. "My boys who are just entering or about ready for high school are making their plans already about what they are going to do, in the country, when they grow up. It used to be they talked about what they were going to do when they grew up, seeming to have in mind everything else except farming." But it couldn't entirely staunch the departures: the number of farms and farm families continued to decline. Most rural children vanished into the glare of the modern world.

But the "liberty poles," it turned out, worked both ways. The extension of electricity into rural areas spurred the movement of city people to the countryside, bringing the "white-lighters" to the farmers' doors. The advancing electric lines, says sculptor John Bisbee, were like ferns uncurling, or so it seems in three aerial photographs of Dunbar Hill in Waitsfield, Vermont, the location of Bisbee's family farm. The photograph from the 1940s captures a world on the cusp of electrification: