Things I remeber - Marjorie Harris Ward

My memories of wiring the Portage home with electricity by Marjorie Harris Ward as related to my son Doug Ward


In the mid twenties Portage began to catch up with the rest of the world as electricity was wired into our town. Today we jump in a car and drive miles without thinking about it; in my youth we didn’t leave Portage often, as a trip to Malad was considered a big trip. We knew bigger towns like Tremonton had electricity but I don’t remember seeing it before it came to Portage. Our home to that point was lighted with kerosene lamps, ours were better than lots of other homes and Kerosene Lamps gave good light but they could cause fires as one of our lamps did during my youth. I was awakened during the night and I remember calling to my brother Virgil (also known as Virgie but mostly Virg) that the house was on fire and then running around yelling “the house is on fire”. Virg said “Stop bawling and screaming Marjorie and get some more water” which I did. We saved the house but the fire burned the ceiling of the new house as well as a beautiful piece of furniture that contained lots of family records and the family couch. My mother and father were out of town when this happened and they were appreciative that we saved the house. For years afterward mother would say “Marjorie saved our house from the fire”. I do know this that we had waited so long for that new house that if we had lost it in the fire it would have been devastating. We lived in a Log house before building our nice new house and we loved the new house so much. My mother wrote in her history about the new house: “it seemed like a Palace to me”. My mother always made do with what she had but I kept after dad until he built the new house. After all, Dad’s brother, Uncle Bob Harris, had built a beautiful new house; one of the nicest in Portage, so I worked on my dad to build us a nice one too. I guess he finally tired of listening to me because he found a contractor to start ours.

When electricity came to town we were one of the first to install it in our house. We were so excited anticipating electrical power coming to our house. We knew when we got power that that would be the end of having to fill the lamps and cleaning their glass chimneys.

When the time came to wire our house Dad bought me a new pair of bib-overalls (these were the first pair of pants I had ever had … girls wore dresses and bloomers, never long pants) He had asked me to help our cousin and his nephew, Loyal “Loy” Harris, who was a self-made electrician, to pull the wires through the attic in the top of the house. I think I was about 10 or 11 years old. Loy had me pull wire into each room to where a hole had been cut in the top of the ceiling to receive the wire and then he would drop a braided speckled wire into the room where he attached a socket to hold one light bulb at the end of each wire. Every light was switched on and off; right at the light … there were no wall switches. We didn’t have any electrical outlets because we didn’t have any electrical appliances to plug them into. For instance, we continued to heat our “sad irons” (the forerunner of electric irons) on the coal/wood stove long after we had electricity. Later on we bought an electric washing machine. The only part of the machine that was electrified was the agitator, everything else was hand powered. But having the agitator electrified was so much better than the hand agitator we had previously.

Because electricity was new and pretty expensive dad was always after all of us to turn off the lights when we left a room. Because of that I’m still pretty good about turning lights off today. After all, things you learn as a child stay with you the rest of your life.

This is the first of what I hope to be many of Grandma's memories about her life. As we get them all together we will publish her life's story.
Dad