Recently, when I went inside our home, I immediately noticed that all of our kerosene lamps were gathered on the kitchen table, and there were many. I asked Mary Alice what was going on. She answered that the chimneys and bases needed to be washed. Now, they already looked clean to me.

Mary Alice went on to say that her mother would not approve of the dusty chimneys. I looked at her and seriously said, “You do remember that your mother died.”

“Bill, of course I do; however, I can still hear her commenting on dusty chimneys.”

Later in the day, the chimneys sparkled in the sun, the bases were filled with Kerosene and the mantles were trimmed to the correct length.

Mary Alice’s mother, who grew up on a farm in Spring Grove in York County, always let it be known that she did not like farm life. One of her chores was to keep the lanterns burning and to be extra careful of the height of the wick. She did not like the smell of coal oil, and most of all she hated the chore of keeping the glass chimneys clean.

Without coal oil and kerosene lanterns, the work on the farm couldn’t be done. The lanterns lit the way to the barn, corn crib, hen house, outhouse and, at the end of the day, up the stairs to the cold bedrooms.

Coal oil, which was eventually replaced with kerosene, sold for about 10 cents a gallon and if a customer asked a shopkeeper for kerosene, he was given a funny look and charged 20 cents for the 10-cent coal oil.

The main difference between coal oil and kerosene is in their origins.

Coal oil is extracted from a type of soft, oily coal known as cannel coal (candle coal). Cannel coal is a specific type of soft coal that contains bitumen, a form of petroleum. It is from this substance that the coal oil is refined.

Kerosene oil is refined directly from liquid petroleum (crude oil). However, historically coal oil was often referred to as kerosene. Today the term kerosene is generally accepted to mean an oily substance obtained during the refining and distillation of petroleum. In some countries, kerosene oil is also referred to as paraffin.

The kerosene lamp came into use shortly after the discovery of petroleum in 1859. The glass chimney was probably the first lighting improvement made in a thousand years.

Kerosene began to lose out to electric lights in 1879 when Edison first successfully made electric pass-through carbon filaments. The city of Scranton became known as the “Electric City” because it was the first major city to use a coal fired generator to make electricity for the city.

However, rural Pennsylvanians had to wait until the middle of the 1930s before the Rural Electric Association brought electricity to the farms. When this occurred, many families threw their kerosene lamps out the window. Many older folks can remember the day and even the date when the lights came on as vividly as birthdays and anniversaries.

Farm wives traded in their sad irons and washboards for electric irons and electric wringer washers. They no longer had to heat the water on wood-fired stoves and a wash day was no longer an all-day affair.

Refrigeration was a blessing to the dairy farmer, who had to keep his milk in pits covered with ice to make sure the temperature stayed below 50 degrees. If the temperature was over 50 degrees, the dairy would refuse to take the milk, leaving the farmer to absorb the loss.

Along with electricity came refrigerators, with big ugly motors on top but still considered God-sent when replacing the ice box.

The radio brought rural families out of isolation. Often, a radio was purchased even before a refrigerator. I remember as a youngster gathering around the radio, listening to shows such as “The Shadow,” “The Green Hornet” and “Amos and Andy.”

Although the coming of electricity revolutionized life in America’s towns and cities, I read that rural electrification was the greatest benefit to rural America.

As late as the mid-1930s, nine out of 10 rural homes were still without electric service. Farmers milked cows by hand in the dim light of a kerosene lantern and families relied on the wood stove for cooking and washboard for laundry. The unavailability of electricity in rural areas kept their economies entirely and exclusively dependent on agriculture.

Factories and businesses, of course, preferred to locate in cities where electric power was easily acquired. For many years, power companies ignored the rural areas of the nation.

The first official action of the federal government pointing the way to the present rural electrification program came with the passage of the Tennessee Valley Authority Act in May 1933. This act authorized the TVA Board to construct transmission lines to serve “farms and small villages that are not otherwise supplied with electricity at reasonable rates.”

On May 11, 1935, Roosevelt signed Executive Order No. 7037 establishing the Rural Electrification Administration. It was not until a year later that the Rural Electrification Act was passed and the lending program that became the REA got underway.

Within months, it became evident to REA officials that established investor-owned utilities were not interested in using federal loan funds to serve sparsely populated rural areas. But loan applications from farmer-based cooperatives poured in, and REA soon realized electric cooperatives would be the entities to make rural electrification a reality.

In 1937, the REA drafted the Electric Cooperative Corporation Act, a model law that states could adopt to enable the formation and operation of not-for-profit, consumer-owned electric cooperatives.

Within four years following the close of World War II, the number of rural electric systems in operation doubled, the number of consumers connected more than tripled and the miles of energized line grew more than five-fold. By 1953, more than 90% of U.S. farms had electricity.

Most rural electrification is the product of locally owned rural electric cooperatives that got their start by borrowing funds from REA to build lines and provide service on a not-for-profit basis. REA is now the Rural Utilities Service, or RUS, and is part of the U.S. Department of Agriculture.

Bill Bower is a retired Pennsylvania Game Commission Wildlife Officer. Read his blog and listen to his podcasts on the outdoors at www.onemaningreen.com.