Life Before Electricity: Part Two

Life in Union County has dramatically changed for most families in the last 100 years.
In my last article I explained how the Tennessee Valley Authority started to provide electricity to the people in the area. At the time a lot of this electricity would be generated from the power of the Clinch River.
Most people in Union County lived along the riverbanks of the Clinch River. The land around the river is the most fertile land for farming. The Clinch River would flood its banks almost every year. Some years it would flood worse than others. This flooding would carry nutrient rich silt and deposit it on the land as rich soil.
People also used the river as transportation so when it was dammed up for the purpose of flood control and electricity, it changed the course of history for Union County.
TVA had to evict many families from the area. Many refused to move because this was their home and many did not have the means to move. The vast majority of families in Union County made their living farming. Cars were just beginning to be mass produced but were still not a luxury that every family had access to for moving their belongings to a new home.
Electricity would be pitched as a way to make life easier for a lot of folks and with time, I believe it did make life a lot easier. We now heat and cool our homes, keep our food preserved, iron our clothes, light the dark of the night, and pump our water to the faucets with electricity. All these things were still accomplished before but just in other means.
In the last article about life without electricity some of these tasks were described like keeping your milk fresh in a spring or a root cellar and heating your home with wood and coal. What about things like lighting and preserving things that spoil faster?
Lighting was either done with candles or with oil lamps. Oil lamps were very common in homes before electricity. Oil that was used was kerosine, also called coal oil. These lamps had a wick that was a tightly woven cotton material that was like a flat piece of rope.
My dad said that his mom would stitch a piece of an old rag or T-shirt to the last bit of wick so that it could still reach the oil to wick it up, and that way she could use every last bit of that store-bought wick. It was tricks like this that people would use to keep from letting anything go to waste.
Some produce and foods last a longer time naturally like butter, onions, and potatoes, especially when stored in a dark cool place like a root cellar, but what about apples, tomatoes, corn and beans or even things like meat?
Older people knew that if you keep certain fruits like apples near other produce that it would cause them to spoil even faster. This is because some fruits like apples release gasses that cause other produce to spoil faster if stored together.
One way that these items could be stored longer was to can them. Canning mostly involved heating these items in the jar. This would kill most of the bacteria that would cause harm to you and keep the items fresher longer. Folks would can things like corn, beans and tomatoes. Apples could be cooked down for hours to make apple butter. This process would cook lots of excess moisture out of the apples.
Once the excess moisture was cooked out, the remainder would be preserved by the natural sugars in the apples. Tomatoes could be preserved the same way by cooking the excess moisture out but it’s the natural acid in the tomatoes that helps preserve the tomato paste.
Almost all food could be preserved by drying them out almost completely dry. Fruits like apples and tomatoes could be laid out on a bed sheet in the midday sun to be dried out. Corn would be dried by leaving it hanging up where critters could not get it then ground up into a meal that would be used for grits and cornbread.
Meats could also be preserved by drying them out. Country ham is a famous breakfast item that is still popular today. Country ham was a process where a ham was hung in a smoke house to be dried out and kept dry until ready for the skillet.
These smoke houses would sometimes use a small fire to let the smoke dry the meat, hence the name smokehouse, but even though it was called a smokehouse, most of the time people didn’t even use smoke or even a fire. Most country ham was dried in the smokehouse with salt. The meat was cured in salt and a block of salt was set in the middle of the smoke house to help draw moisture away from the meat.
Life might be a little easier with electricity, but some things are just better with a little bit of extra work. Life might have been tough for our families back then but it sure did taste better.
My dad said he wishes he had written down his mom’s recipe for fried apple pies. He is not sure what made them taste so good but he does remember that she always made them with sun-dried apples.