Rural Electrification

Another similar hamlet was the town of Crooks (also known by the more elegant name of Palm Grove). This place was located adjacent the interurban tracks, about 5 or 6 miles east and north of the Peterson farm. I think the elevator there is still in use, perhaps as part of one of the larger cooperatives that have been formed in recent years by the merger of several smaller firms or coops.

The interurban is an electrified railroad and I suppose it carried freight as well as passengers. Like the M and St. L it was still offering passenger service as late as the early 1940s. Once or twice when I came back home from school at Iowa City I used the interurban between Des Moines and Harcourt (where my father or some other member of the family picked me up). Between Iowa City and Des Moines I had to use a bus line.

The electric service provided by the interurban line was the source of the electricity at the Peterson farm. At least initially, later the power came from Gowrie. A group of farmers in the area of the Peterson farm had joined together, I suppose in the 1910s and formed a cooperative to supply themselves with electricity. They put up the lines, connected up with the interurban, and ran the system themselves. Later on they hooked up with the municipal plant in Gowrie.

Grandfather Strand’s farm did not have electric service until in the 1930s when the rural electrification system of the Roosevelt years made it possible. Anton Holmer was a guiding light in achieving this as he was renting grandfather Strand’s farm at the time.

I can remember family visits to the Holmer household in which a kerosene lantern or a more modern adaptation (such as a Coleman lantern) were brought and used towards dusk. I can also remember uncle Reuben’s house which had been wired for electricity at the time it was built (probably in the 1910s) and did not get electricity until the 1930s.

Uncle Reuben with his usual lack of business acumen built expensive buildings (house, barn, corn crib, maybe other buildings) as he started farming. This financial impediment doubtless dogged him during most of his farming career, along with his typically poor continuing financial misadventures and lack of foresight and control. I think his decision to build the expensive buildings was the result of the boom in farm income occasioned by WWI. What he did not foresee was the diminished income of the 1920s when a more normal farm economy resumed.

My father and uncle Reuben had together bought the nucleus of the Reuben Strand farm before uncle Reuben had married and started farming. My father about that time gave title to the land to his brother, assuming the indebtedness taken on by his brother. He should never have done this but either split the property or insisted on joint tenancy. That way my father would have had the income all those years when uncle Reuben was simply benefiting from the arrangement.