40 The Business of Ontario Agriculture Better Farming | May 2024 REVISITING EARLY ELECTRICAL POWER Some of us remember very well. By Ralph Winfield In a recent article, I showed you the covered bridge and the public school I attended in West Montrose. I was born and raised on a nearby farm without hydro. I still remember carrying the lantern to the barn and milking cows by hand with the coal oil lantern hung on some nails on the barn joist. That was quite an experience. Without electricity, we also manually cranked the cream separator. If you did not crank it fast enough, the bell on the crank arm would ring! The cream we took to the house and held in a cream can in the cool basement, and the milk we fed to the pigs. A local fellow picked up the cream once a week (twice a week in summertime) and took it to the creamery in Guelph to make butter. We had a battery-powered radio for picking up the local news and a 400day clock in the house. The clock had to be wound once a year. We were not alone; many farms could not get hydro until after the Second World War ended. Electric wiring and connecters were not available. You couldn’t buy them anywhere during the war. Ontario Hydro was not extending lines to many rural areas due to lower populations. My cousins – on the farm where my mother was raised – did not get hydro until well into the 1950s. They borrowed our battery-powered radio (photo on next page) until the rural Ontario Hydro lines were extended up the side of that farm. Working for Ontario Hydro As an engineer with Ontario Hydro, I promoted the use of electrical power on Ontario farms for almost 10 years. The farm sales department was trying to expand usage in rural areas to get more kilowatt hours per mile of line. One strategy was to encourage electric brooding to increase the demand. Most of the farms didn’t have natural gas, so the alternative was propane. The benefit of electric for poultry brooding and swine farrowing operations was fire safety, as there were no flames. Poultry brooding barns and swine farrowing buildings had wood shavings or straw on the floor, which increased the risk. There were enough barn fires from propane at the time that some insurance companies gave farms reduced rates if they used electric for their poultry or swine farrowing operations. Once farm businesses were established with propane, it was difficult to switch, so we usually worked with them at the outset if they were building a broiler or farrowing building. We had agricultural farm sales staff in all the regions of Ontario who were out maintaining contact with farmers looking to start or expand their operations. I chose to leave Ontario Hydro when my in-laws wanted to move out of the old two-storey farmhouse that had acquired hydro-electricity in 1910. That is when we moved in. Needless to say, I had to upgrade the total farm wiring system so that my late wife could obtain the essential kitchen upgrades she wanted – things we take for granted now, like an oven, a dishwasher, and all those counter appliances. These upgrades were essential to expand the kitchen area and lower some cupboards down from the high 10-foot ceilings. Many of our light switches are still the vintage push button types from the early 20th century. Fortunately, the wiring was not knob-and-tube, as was common in many early wired buildings. They, too, were not safe from a modern regulatory perspective. Knob-and-tube had only two wires, which were insulated, but with no ground wire. They were always exHow it Works Push-button switch used in early wired houses. Many of them are still in use in the main farmhouse that was wired in about 1910. Fortunately, it did not have the early knob-and-tube wiring system. Aurora Bancroft photo
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