The innovations in farming I outlined a couple of weeks ago weren’t the only things that were drastically changing how folks lived around these parts way back when.
Up until the first quarter of the 20th century, the Fox Valley’s small town and rural residents lived much as they had for the previous century. Home and business lighting was largely by oil lamps and even candles, cooking was powered by wood and coal stoves, and communications went by mail or telegraph.
In the late 19th century, home and business lighting got a bit of a boost with the invention of small, affordable acetylene gas generators that could be installed in individual homes and businesses. The gas was generated by mixing carbide crystals with water and then trapping the gas that was produced – acetylene – which was then piped to gas fixtures in the walls wall and ceilings.
Oswego hardware merchant John Edwards invented and patented an acetylene gas generator about 1900 that was available in several sizes designed to supply sufficient gas to light everything from small homes to large businesses. Edwards supplied the units for many homes in and around Oswego, along with two of the town’s churches.
On May 1, 1901, the Kendall County Record’s Oswego correspondent remarked: “‘Let there be light,’ and that the acetylene, so thought Doc Woolley and James Pearce, who had it put in their residences by John Edwards, whose generator of the gas is considered the best extant.”
It wasn’t long until the Western United Gas and Electric Company in Aurora decided there was a market for gas outside that city for its coal gas. Manufactured in a factory on River Street, coal gas was captured and pumped into large tanks on Hurd’s Island in the Fox River and other Aurora locations, where it was distributed to homes and businesses by gas mains.
In 1912, Western United got a contract to extend its gas mains to Oswego. Over the next few years, the mains were pushed west, all the way to Sandwich. The gas wasn’t only used for lighting and cooking, either. In Yorkville, Western United’s gas heated the lead for the Kendall County Record’s Linotype typesetting machine, replacing the old, dangerous gasoline heater the paper had been using.
Electricity had reached the towns along the Fox River, from Aurora south to Yorkville in 1900, when the interurban trolley line was built. From downtown Aurora, the line followed River Street south through Montgomery, where it followed today’s Route 31 south to Oswego. There, it crossed the Fox River on a new box-truss iron bridge, and climbed a wooden trestle over the Chicago, Burlington & Quincy Railroad tracks before turning south, following Oswego’s Main Street to modern Route 71, which it followed to Van Emmon Road. There, the tracks bent westward and ran into downtown Yorkville.
Since the trolleys ran on electricity, power lines had to follow the tracks and thus utility poles quickly went up all along the route and throughout the towns through which the trolley passed. Western United’s gas and its electricity competed with each other until usage shook out with gas being used mostly for cooking and electricity for lighting and powering electric motors in businesses ranging from grain elevators to the Record’s newspaper office. Record editor and publisher John R. Marshall announced in the Oct. 12, 1910, edition of the paper that he had a steam engine for sale that formerly powered the printing press. “We are using electric motors in The Record office now and have no use for our steam engine. This is a four horsepower engine with a five horsepower boiler. Come in and see it,” he invited.
The third innovation that had a major, lifestyle changing impact on the Fox Valley’s residents was the introduction of networked telephone service. Phones had existed as stand-alone devices for decades before the early years of the 20th century. For instance, Oswego druggist Levi Hall had connected his downtown Oswego store with his home in the 1880s. In the 1890s, the Esch Brothers & Rabe Ice Company connected their giant ice houses just north of Oswego with the village’s railroad depot to help organize rail shipments of ice.
By 1900, the Chicago Telephone Company and the Northern Illinois Telephone Company were vying for customers up and down the Fox Valley. And that’s the year the companies began expanding their lines into rural areas between the villages dotting the Fox River’s banks. By late November 1900, the Record’s Specie Grove correspondent observed: “The telephones now in are giving satisfaction. A large part of the farmers along the lines will avail themselves of this up-to-date luxury.”
It’s hard to gauge just how big the effect of extending gas, electric, and telephone lines was to Kendall County’s towns and rural areas, but it’s pretty clear it was huge. Full electrical service wasn’t extended throughout the county until the Rural Electrification Administration finished the job during the Great Depression. For those who had access, it was a social and economic revelation. Western United’s gas lines paved the way for today’s Nicor network. The switch from Western United’s coal gas to natural gas piped to the Fox Valley from Texas took place in 1931. It would be several more decades before the highly toxic, carcinogenic industrial waste created by Aurora’s gas plant would be cleaned up.
But it was probably the introduction of telephone service, both in town and out in the country that had the biggest effect on the county’s economic and social life. Phones meant it was no longer necessary to physically visit friends or relatives to chat. Wrote one Oswego-area farmer in January 1901: “We talked to the ancient city of Plattville over the ‘phone Friday. What a triumph!” Others, however, worried about the lack of personal contact the phones would encourage –worries that we’re still expressing in this modern era of smart phones and super computers.
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