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Life Unplugged
Before St. Mary's County Had Electricity
by Julia A. King
Professor of Anthropology and Director of the SlackWater Center
One of the purposes of the SlackWater publication is to draw on the region's history when exploring issues facing the Southern Maryland community today. SlackWater's goal is to foster conversations about this history and its relevance today among students, faculty, and the greater community served by St. Mary's College of Maryland.
Beginning in 2003, the Maryland Broadband Cooperative, with support from the Maryland General Assembly, has been working hard to bring broadband Internet access to the rural areas of Maryland. Construction is underway, including laying more than 800 miles of fiber-optic cable. This spring, environmental concerns have been raised about the impact of infrastructure development for broadband access, and the General Assembly has weighed in on the issue.
Nearly 60 years ago, a similar effort was underway when Congress established the Rural Electrification Administration with the purpose of electrifying the nation's rural communities.
Although the first commercial electric power plant in the nation opened in New York City in 1882, electricity did not come to Southern Maryland for another half century. In 1936, Congress, hoping to raise the standard of living in rural communities, established the Rural Electrification Administration. By 1938, a power plant was up and running at Pope's Creek, Maryland, serving Charles, Prince George's, and St. Mary's counties. This plant was owned by the Southern Maryland Tri-County Cooperative Association, which in 1942 became the Southern Maryland Electric Cooperative, or SMECO.
Electricity--and especially electrical appliances--dramatically changed the way people lived, and nowhere was that impact more evident than in the lives of the women who ran the rural households of Southern Maryland.
In the narrative fragments that follow, abstracted from Volume V of SlackWater, we hear about the nature of household work from the women who did it in rural, pre-electrified Southern Maryland.
We also catch glimpses of how electricity and the expansion of telephone service would profoundly reshape life in Southern Maryland. News that previously took weeks to reach isolated rural areas was now delivered almost overnight through the radio.
We had a wood stove [and] we had oil lamps. No electricity. We didn't have running water or that kind of thing; we had to pump the water and bring it into the house. Water buckets with dippers, that kind of thing.
- Mildred Fletcher
Down at Point Lookout, [our] cook stove [used] kerosene and it had the oven on one side and the flat burners here and you had a little jar of kerosene sitting on the side that fueled the flame. You had to constantly fill up that little jar with kerosene in order to be able to cook. We didn't have a refrigerator or anything. We had to use ice for our refrigeration.
- Eunice Knott
In the wintertime, Momma would sit there by the wood stove. [She] was a wonderful woman. She'd get up in the morning by sun-up [and] cook breakfast. It was all done on a wood stove. We'd have what you call hash browns, bacon, and sausage. What you raised was what you had.
- Mary Ora Norris
[For meat], my father killed at least five hogs every year. There was no ice, no iceboxes, so we had to salt the meat to keep it.
- Ruth Goddard Knott
[I] used to help with the butter churning and that kind of thing. The first churn I used was a big stone jar with a stick in the center. You worked [the stick] up and down [by hand] 'til the butter came.
- Mildred Fletcher
We had to go to the next door neighbor's house to get our water. We had to carry our water.
- Helen Louise Fenwick
We carried water for… I guess it was over a half a mile for washing and everything.
- Ruth Goddard Knott
She [had] an electric radio. Where I lived, we didn't have a generator. We had a battery radio. We took the battery out of our car, and sit it in the corner and hook it up to the radio and that's what we listened to. That was the good old days.
- Julius Knott, son of
Ruth Goddard Knott
[When my brother died from drowning], they had his funeral at the lighthouse at Mr. Willis' home. I was the only one from the family that went to the funeral. Momma had died, and Pop couldn't go. See, then there wasn't phones. There just wasn't ways to let people know like there are now.
- Myrtle Dare
[Our telephone was] the wind-up kind. You had to rrrrrr [motions]. The Coast Guard [had the same kind] and it was a party line. You had umpteen people on one line and if you lifted up the receiver and listened, you could hear all kinds of conversations (chuckles). And we listened in on a lot of people's conversations. So you knew just about all what went on in the neighborhood!
- Eunice Knott
There was no television back then. [But] we had an old, old roll-top radio in the living room, and I was fooling around with that. And I came across this news that Japan had declared war on the United States.
- Eunice Knott
I remember vividly listening to a report of the bombing of Pearl Harbor, on a radio that wasn't very clear, on a Sunday afternoon. Yes, I remember that vividly. It sounded like a fearful catastrophe had hit us, and people were shocked at how suddenly it hit.
- J. Frank Raley
My uncle is the one who brought electricity to St. Mary's County in 1927. My uncle had the ice plant in Leonardtown. He brought electricity here and he bought a four-cylinder diesel and put that in that ice plant up there. He generated electricity. We had electricity here in Great Mills in 1927, but most people in the county [didn't] get electricity until the REA (Rural Electrification Act) in 1939.
- John Thomas Cecil
