Gaye LeBaron: Before PG&E, a patchwork of small companies brough power, light to Sonoma County

We are talking today about electricity, as a commodity. At present it is a commodity that the governor and at least one candidate for president, stumping through California, is suggesting for state ownership. Such a proposal turns up the volume on a discussion that has been gaining intensity in these troubled times: Do we want to take over Pacific Gas & Electric Co.? Is that salvation? Or a can of worms? Don’t send answers, it’s an academic question. As always, with academic questions, we look to history for answers.

But this isn’t about the recent history of our Northern California power company - not the plan for a nuclear plant on Bodega Head in the ’60s, or even the tragic loss of life and property in the fires of recent years.

This is time travel back to the earliest years of light and power in this area to get a sense of … what, confusion? Call it our age of trial-and-error. Let’s start with a headline and excerpt from a news story of 1920.

Back Here to ?Primitive Nights.

Light Ban is Almost ?a Nightmare.

That’s the headline. Here’s the ?news story:

Pitchy black darkness, which reaches down out of the sky and wraps you around with its mantle, so that you seem like an isolated atom, makes you realize just how small your are in the vast scheme of things, and how entirely dependent you have become upon the conveniences of modern times.

Electrical stores report a record business in flashlights since the order of the city council cutting out streetlights at 3:30 o’clock in the morning went into effect. …

The Press Democrat writer is telling us streetlights went off a couple of hours before dawn. It was front-page news - or perhaps front-page lament is a better way to say it.

Reread the part about how the town was “entirely dependent … upon the conveniences of modern times.”

That was 100 years ago. Electric lights were still rare in rural areas and not that long enjoyed in the “big towns” like Santa Rosa and Petaluma.

As the writer suggests, it was still a time when the only thing that could be termed disastrous that occurred when the system was turned off - or, more likely, failed - was that the streets got dark and people had to pull out their old oil lamps and candles, which they kept handy, believe you me.

Still, civilization had advanced to the point where dark streets were newsworthy. The story continues:

Our forefathers thought nothing of walking several miles through darkness in the days before electric street lighting became the rule rather than the exception, but our modern man hesitates before he will walk three blocks.

One objection, belated travelers say, is the rise and fall of curbstones in Santa Rosa. You can never tell whether you have a straight and level path across a street intersection or whether you have a drop from one to ten inches. And the curb on one side of the street is often times at a different level than on the other side.

Swathed in darkness, the pedestrian has an awful shock after reaching up for a ten-inch curb to find his foot dropping down to a two-inch curb.

It’s worse than a nightmare, they say.

But one seasoned night-traveler has solved the difficulty.

He advises walking in the middle of the street.

Try that now and you’ll quickly learn the other, more dramatic, meaning of the phrase “Lights Out!”

HHHHHH

IF DARK STREETS for a couple of hours before dawn could stir up such anxiety in 1920, one can’t help but make a mental list of all the present-day losses we experience when our lights go. They fretted about needing flashlights. How long are our lists of things that stop, go out, die with a whimper, become impossible today without electricity?

They fretted about streetlights. Just in the average household – not counting medical equipment - we fret about computers, landline telephones, heating systems, frozen food, dirty laundry, garage doors, hot water heaters - stop me when you’ve had enough.

HHHHHH

AND, LET’S FACE it; we worry about the company that provides, for a price, these electric advantages.

I dipped into the archives last week for a quick look at how, when and why PG&E came to us.

Books have been written, some on the company’s dime, some not. They agree on a basic timeline.

For this area, the year is 1905. That’s when the San Francisco Gas and Electric Co. and the California Gas and Electric Corp. merged to become Pacific Gas and Electric.

That ended 35 years of decisions and indecisions for our hometowns. In 1870s editions of the Sonoma Democrat - for which we are indebted to a close-to-home researcher, Dee Blackman whose 1970s research is a precious source for the stories of how electricity came to our towns. There were somewhere near a dozen small companies that took their turn offering to “light” Sonoma County towns, first by gas and then with electricity.

In Blackman’s card file index of the earliest Santa Rosa newspapers, which is safe in Sonoma State’s library for all to explore, we find Santa Rosans first introduced to “gasolyne” lamps to light the streets in 1870.

This innovation ignited some 15 years of argument over the cost of street lighting, the dependability of coal gas obtained from deposit on nearby Taylor Mountain, mounting rumors of the potential of electricity, and, most of all, saying hello and goodbye to the parade of small companies (“startups” we would say today) that formed and merged and sold and failed and disappeared. Starting with the adventurous “gasolyne” lamp of pioneer Maxim Gas Co., the competition for the hearts, minds and pocketbooks of Santa Rosa subscribers would include at least five more energy providers in the next three decades.

Following after Maxim in 1875, there was Santa Rosa Gas Light Co., which built the first real gasworks in town, which survived despite City Council nagging, until 1886, when the news that Petaluma streets were being lighted by electricity (!) sent city fathers off in a new direction. Within the month, Pacific Coast Electrical Construction Co. had set up camp in Santa Rosa and before long the city had staged an “Electric Light Social” at Kroncke’s Park (on today’s map think Creekside Apartments on Fourth Street, just beyond College) to introduce citizens to the new system.

The stage was set for Thompson-Houston Electric Light Co. and Keith Electric Light Co. to peddle power in town over the next two years. By 1886 the newspaper would report, gleefully, “120 electric lights in Santa Rosa.”

The following year a City Council count of streetlights gave 60 to Thompson-Houston and 50 to Keith. Then things apparently took a downturn. The headlines referred to “Dark Days.” Electricity was losing favor because of the costs, and “gasolyne” had been losing favor for some time.

Enter Pacific Lighting Co. of San Francisco that absorbed the gas light company and in ’94 bought Merchant Lighting, the electrical provider.

The last of the line came in 1901, a substantial San Francisco power consortium called California Central Gas and Electric, which built sturdier lines from Napa to Petaluma, Petaluma to Santa Rosa and onward. It was electricity for the area in a way that seemed - maybe for the very first time - a permanent fixture

Four years later, we learn from Charles M. Coleman’s corporate history of PG&E, California Central became part of Northern California’s new consortium known as Pacific Gas & Electric in 1905.

(It should be noted, without comment, that the long front page lament in 1920, about lights going out to often, came?15 years later on.)

The pattern of consolidation of small companies continued well into the 20th century, with PG&E buying the first providers of electricity to rural areas.

My own family was witness to this. My father worked as a lineman and jack-of-all-trades in the 1940s for his brother-in-law who owned one of those small companies - Southern Humboldt Light and Power, if I remember correctly.

I do well remember bouncing around on the seat of my Dad’s big Ford pickup while he read the meters of customers in very small Eel River communities like South Fork, Myers Flat and the “big town,” Weott. We sometimes stopped for a short visit - and the always-proffered cup of coffee from the big pot on the back of the wood stove.

Not so joyous are the memories of those Humboldt winter rains when he would be walking the lines alone to find and fix the damage. In the mid-1940s, Uncle Charlie sold to PG&E and Dad worked for the company as a lineman until we moved to Sonoma County in 1950.

Now, here we are, 115 years from the advent of our “modern” utility and it seems that nothing - and everything - has changed.