Neighbors

It was 1941 And There Was Light

When the lights went on in 1941, they lit up the town like never before. That’s because until that fall, Aurora and the other small towns in the Union River watershed didn’t have electricity.

And, given how every day changed when the lights came on, wiring the town for power was the biggest thing that ever happened in this small place.

That’s the recollection of Aurora native Herbert Silsby, later a Maine Superior Court judge who had graduated high school two years earlier. He spent that summer on the crew that staked out all the lines.

When your father is one of the four men who make the decision to start a local electrical cooperative, you don’t have to look far for summer work.

“The area was so rural,” Silsby remembered. “All the rest of Hancock County had electricity for a good 20 years before.

“But not Aurora, Amherst, Great Pond, Otis and the rest. It just wasn’t feasible for Bangor Hydro to build a mile of line between every customer. There was no way the commercial utility companies could do anything.”

Spurred by the Rural Electrification Act that came out of the Depression, a group of four—the elder Herbert Silsby, Russell Mace, Leon Williams and Waltham’s Ralph Jordan—got a government loan at 2-percent to start the project.

“Suddenly there was light,” Silsby said, “and it was a great blessing.”

Oil furnaces, flush toilets and refrigerators soon followed, he said.

Until power arrived, some of the better-off families had managed to light up their lives using batteries and generators. But that was actually a nuisance, Silsby said, remembering how his grandfather had depended on a Delco system. “You had to run the generator several hours a day, just to keep all the batteries charged,” he said.

But not after 1941, when electricity for all changed everything.