The following article was printed in short form in the Fall 2008 Goodhue County Historical News. The article may not be reproduced without the permission of the author.  Opinions expressed by the author or in quotations do not necessarily represent those of the society, its Directors or staff.

85 Years of Electricity on The Farm

by Marian E Glew

It began on Christmas Eve in 1923.  Electricity lighted an outdoor Christmas tree on the W.A. Cady farm located on Highway No. 3 in Burnside Township about three and one-half miles west of Red Wing. [i]  Eighty-five years later the Cady farm is a residential area across the highway from upper Anderson Park, the highway is US 61, and Burnside Township is part of Red Wing.

 This is where what is believed to be the first experimental rural electric line in the world began.  In 1923 the State Committee on the Relation of Electricity to Agriculture, the University of Minnesota, Northern States Power Company (NSP), now Xcel, seventy-nine manufacturers of household and farm equipment, and farm families of the Burnside community joined together to test the concept of using electricity to improve the business of farming.

Electricity had been used in city homes and businesses for decades.  Families in rural areas, for the most part, relied on kerosene lamps, windmills, and manual labor.  Although there had been considerable interest in electricity in rural areas for some time, little progress had been made.  The problem was a complex one.  A power company in town could serve fifty to two hundred customers per mile of electric line. [ii]  Investor-owned utility companies could not justify the cost of extending power lines to areas where there would be, at best, three customers per mile of line.  If farmers were to benefit from the use of electricity, they would have to find more uses for it - uses in addition to lighting their homes and pumping water.  They would need to use electricity to reduce the amount of work required for a task, thus increasing productivity and making their farming operations more profitable.

In California, great hydro plants in the high Sierra Nevada Mountains generated electricity for irrigation and other uses in rural areas. [iii]  Generating electricity in Minnesota was a different story.  Some farmers used gasoline engines or local water power.  Others formed neighborhood groups, usually cooperatives and usually unsuccessful, to produce electric power.  A few power companies lengthened their electric lines to reach nearby farming areas.  In Red Wing, NSP had extended service 3.3 miles to the Goodhue County Farm buildings which stood across the highway from the Red Wing Shoe Company’s present location.  The experimental line continued for 6.3 miles from the County Farm.

The purpose of the experimental rural electric line was “to determine the optimum economic uses of electricity in agriculture and to study the value of electricity in improving living conditions on the farm." [iv]

Eight families participated in the Red Wing Project when work began in the fall of 1923.  They were the Alfred Bryan, William Bryan, William Cady, Henry Eckblad, Bennett Melin, Frank Miller, Arthur Nelson, and Horace and Walter Nelson families. [v] These were the first farm families to use electric stoves and ovens, refrigerators, clothes washing machines, irons, vacuum cleaners.  Theirs were the first rural homes equipped with electric pumps to bring water into the house for cooking, laundry, and sanitation.

Soon the Vasa Children’s Home, the A.P. Anderson farm at Tower View, and the two-story Burnside Consolidated School were connected to the experimental line.
 
One family can claim residency since 1923.  Robert and Marian Bryan Gustafson live near her grandfather A.C. Bryan’s house on one of the original farms.[vi]
At the Eckblad farm, Grace Eckblad Nelson’s father Herbert, then a teenager, was hired to help set the poles.  Later, as a young girl, Nelson remembers visiting her grandparents and admiring the beautiful dining room light fixture and the electric space heater. [vii]

In addition to lighting, farm equipment tested during the experiment included chicken incubators and brooders, portable utility motors, feed grinders, and barn ventilating fans.  Household equipment tested included mangles, dishwashers, well and cistern pumps, water heaters, butter churns, and small appliances such as a toaster, frying pan, electric griddle, egg beater, food chopper, as well as portable fans and space heaters.

Using electricity for cooking and baking could be a benefit or a problem.  In the 1920s many farm homes still relied on a wood burning range (the cook-stove) to heat the kitchen and to maintain an ever ready supply of hot water during the cold months. Few had central heating.  After switching from wood to electricity for cooking, some farm families installed furnaces to heat their homes, including the kitchen.  Others kept their wood burning ranges and used the new electric ranges only during the summer months. [viii]

Electricity provided power for farm tasks including sawing wood, mixing concrete, drying crops, and threshing grain.  Fewer hours spent doing such jobs meant greater profits and less need for hired help.  Electric milking machines were a success.  Electric cream separators extracted more cream to sell and left less cream in the skim milk which was fed to the hogs.

Professor E.A. Stewart, division of Agricultural Engineering at the University of Minnesota “forged a close working relationship with the farm families on the Red Wing line and with farm implement and electrical equipment manufacturers.  Within three years of the inception of the project, individual farmers were using electric motors to cut silage, grind feed, hoist hay, and pump water  . . . .    He spent hours on the farms of Goodhue County, helping NSP customers install electric motors, belts, pulleys, gearshifts, and transmission systems." [ix]  Professor Stewart’s interest in the project and the participating families went beyond his professional responsibilities; he was fondly remembered by the Nelson Brothers who saved a Christmas card from him.

The Burnside community was selected for the experiment because it presented certain difficulties in line construction and in the uses of electricity on the farms.  The area is hilly and Spring Creek, which flows through several of the farms, can flood in the spring or after a heavy storm.  Then as now, severe weather brings electric wires down and rural lines can be especially vulnerable. 

Electric equipment used in the experiment was loaned by the manufacturers to the University, then loaned by the University to the farm families.  A meter was attached to each piece of equipment to register the amount of electricity used.  Additionally, five of the farmers kept detailed financial records during the four-year experiment.  In 1925, the net income on these farms was 50% greater than in 1924. [x] Electricity was indeed making these farming operations more profitable.  Heating and lighting the hen house resulted in more eggs to sell, especially during low production winter months.  A constant supply of water in drinking cups in the dairy barn resulted in increased milk production.

 Laura Schwartau had grown up on a farm in Featherstone Township and was well acquainted with farm life.  She lived with her grandparents in Red Wing while attending high school and later as secretary to the president of the Bank of Pierce Simmons.  (She was the first woman employed by the bank.)  When she married Walter Nelson in September 1924 and moved to the Nelson Brothers farm, she did not have to give up the pleasures of living with electricity.  The new Mrs Nelson moved to a farm home with electric lights, modern appliances, and a bathroom with hot and cold running water.  Over the years, Nelson was interviewed several times as The Red Wing Project was presented in magazines and newspapers.  She was “the bride.”  She recalled working around “the meters, everywhere the meters," [xi] which were attached to each piece of electrical equipment.  When the experiment was completed she returned the electric range, which was expensive to operate, and went back to using the wood burning range which she kept until 1952.  Laura Nelson was the last surviving member of the eight original participating families.

NSP assumed the cost of building the line and supplied the watt-hour meters for measuring energy consumption.  Setting rates that would encourage use of electricity and that the farmers could afford to pay was a key issue.  The rate schedule included a fixed charge and an energy charge per kilowatt hour.  The energy charge rate decreased as consumption increased.  This enabled the farmers to use electricity for more farm tasks which led to greater profits.
In 1924, NSP produced a half-hour documentary film to promote electricity on the farm.  Laura and Walter Nelson appear in the silent film.  [xii]

News of The Red Wing Project spread and experiments were set up in more than twenty other states.  There were also inquires from England, Ireland, Sweden, Czechoslovakia, Germany, and many other countries.  Use of electricity on farms around the world began with the 6.3 mile-long experimental line in Burnside.

As 1927 drew to a close, the experiment was completed.  The success of the popular project encouraged additional farmers to convert their operations to utilize electricity.  In 1928 the University published its findings taken from Professor Stewart’s voluminous records.  Eight farm families in Burnside, plus others who had joined the project soon after it began, had participated in a unique experiment which set the stage for use of electricity as we experience it today.  Participating families could purchase the loaned equipment at reduced prices, or return the equipment.  Some of this original farm and household equipment was still being used into the 1950s.