Some believe that internet access is a necessity of life. Especially since the pandemic, the internet was used for kids’ education and many people worked from home by using the internet.
Some day when our kids are grown up, they will not believe or understand how we could have possibly lived without the internet.
Just less than a hundred years ago people lived without electricity. Just like the internet, some people felt like they didn’t need electricity and would live without.
TVA was the first provider of electricity in the area. It was becoming available during the time of the Great Depression. Many folks in this area had hard feelings towards TVA.
The government had used eminent domain to acquire land for the building of Norris Dam and Norris Lake that would be the source of the electricity by using the mighty power of the Clinch River to create hydroelectric power.
Many people of Union County not only chose not to pay for electricity due to their hard feeling towards TVA but also because it was an added cost they just could not afford.
The government used propaganda films to advocate for the benefits of the TVA. These films showed how electricity would improve the lives of people living in the Tennessee Valley. If you are interested in seeing one of these films search “Tennessee Valley” on Youtube.
Since people of Union County had been living without electricity since the first families settled here in around 1790s, they had no problem living without.
Washing clothes was done by hand and dried on a line outside or by a wood stove in the winter. Cooking was done on a wood cookstove. People would iron their clothes by heating an iron up on that same woodstove.
Things like milk were kept cold by either having a spring house and some folks had a cooler that used a block of ice to keep food cold, but this was usually city folks that could have ice delivered or picked up relatively easy.
Keeping things in a spring house worked really well. People would put milk or whatever else they needed to keep cold in glassware and set it in a protected spot in the spring.
A spring, being a place where groundwater is coming up, is an ideal place to keep milk. The water is consistently about 55 degrees F. coming out of the ground in Tennessee.
This is the same reason that caves around here are a consistent 55 degrees. If a farm had a cave close by it also could be used to store milk and food.
If a family did not have a cave or a spring nearby on their farm then a root cellar would be used. A root cellar was just simply a hole dug in the ground to use the natural insulating properties of the dirt under the surface of the earth. Root cellars were dug into a hillside or under the house and were used not only to keep food from spoiling during the hot months but to also keep them from freezing during the winter months.
One reason these holes in the ground were called root cellars was because almost every family would have a cellar even if you had a spring house, because it would be used to store potatoes and onions throughout the winter to eat and to plant what was left the next year.
In my next article I plan to go into more detail about the means and ways folks around here made a living without electricity—things like food preservation and seasonal preparations.