Mom’s First Brush with Electricity

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Mom’s First Brush with Electricity

Saturday, March 8th, 2008 | Family Tree - Jones Side |

My mother, Dorothy Lucille Jones, was born in 1926. I knew that she was 10 years old before she lived in a house with electricity, and that she learned to cook on a wood stove using a White House cookbook. This morning she told me about the first time she lived in an electrified house.

She described the house as Doc Waters place* on the highway going from Maryville to Walland, Tennessee. What’s now called Highway 321, though some people in Maryville still call it Walland Highway. It wouldn’t surprise me if people in Walland and Townsend call it Maryville Highway, in the same way that what Maryville people call Old Knoxville Highway is what Knoxville people call Old Maryville Pike.

The house was an old three room log cabin that had been retrofitted with electrical wiring. In the early days of TVA and the electrification movement the houses closer to a major road were the first to get electricity. The farther you were from a major road the more years you had to wait for the utility company to get around to stringing wires to your house.

Once the family had a place with electricity her dad bought her mom an electric clothes washer. There was room in the kitchen for the washer, but her mother didn’t want it there. She wanted it on the porch so that everyone could see that she owned a washing machine. I used to wonder why people around here used to have washing machines on their front porches and I guess that’s why. If you had never owned an electric appliance in your life you’d be mighty proud of it and you’d want to show it off.

The cabin had electric lights, which Thomas Edison had invented in 1879. In their previous houses the family used oil lamps. She remembers her mother having to wash the lamp globes every day because they’d get black with soot. That’s how she started telling me the story. She was talking about house cleaning and that led to one thing and then another.

One evening the adults were gone and a lightbulb blew out. Mom knew where the extra bulbs were kept so she decided to change the bulb herself. She stood on a chair and started unscrewing the old bulb, but it seized in the socket and the glass globe broke off.

She decided to pry the rest of the bulb out. With a metal fork. Or as she put it, she planned on twisting the bulb, but the bulb wound up twisting her, and she learned a lesson about respecting this new force in her life called electricity. When her parents got home her mother switched off the light, put a piece of potato in the socket, and used the potato to twist the rest of the bulb out.

* For any local oldtimers who might want to take a guess as to the location of the house, here’s a couple of clues. The log cabin was whitewashed when they moved in and her dad whitewashed it with a mop every spring. Aso, her mom and dad in this story are her adoptive parents the Whiteheads, not her biological parents the Everetts.

2 Comments to Mom’s First Brush with Electricity

Bill
March 8, 2008

Wow, neat story. As our grandparents and parents pass on, memories like this will go with them unless someone writes them down and shares them. Thanks for sharing with us.