The Night the Lights Came on in Brooks, GA

     If this column’s title sounds a bit familiar, the reader is probably thinking of Vicki Lawrence’s 1972 hit, “The Night the Lights Went Out in Georgia:”

                     That’s the night that the lights went out in Georgia
                        That’s the night that they hung an innocent man
                          Well, don’t trust your soul to no backwoods Southern lawyer
                              ‘Cause the judge in the town’s got bloodstains on his hands.

     While no one ever wrote a song about the night the lights came on in Brooks, Georgia, it is a wonderful Southern story, nevertheless.

       FDR’s Rural Electrification Administration (REA) brought electricity to rural America in the 1930s and 1940s, forever changing life across the nation.   Had rural Georgia had to wait for the state’s giant, for-profit power company to bring current to the forks of the creeks, it might have still been waiting even in 2026.   All your compiler must do is look at the big silver propane tank at the end of his driveway, which a Spalding Gas truck comes periodically to refill, to realize that Brooks still does not have natural gas service even today – because we don’t have the population density to support it. 

      It is not a long leap in logic to postulate that folks in places like Brooks would still be running gasoline generators for our electricity had it not been for the REA and its successors, the not-for-profit electric membership cooperatives across much of the nation.  

       In Brooks, the poles were placed and the wires were strung by the REA in the spring and summer of 1939.  Houses were wired and switches placed, and many folks would check the switches daily to see whether or not the current had been activated yet.   Many lost track of whether the switches were in the on or off position by October of that year.

       Your compiler’s father, who was a toddler in October 1939, lived in a house on the McIntosh Road (now the Second Chance Thrift Shop) with his parents, his maternal grandmother, two maiden aunts and an unmarried uncle.   One Indian Summer night that month, they decided to make a picnic and carry it back to some massive rocks along a branch (what folks now call a creek) on the farm, and enjoy what might be the last gasp of warm weather before spring.  Fully satisfied with the evening, they loaded into the family’s 1934 Ford sedan and headed back to the house just as darkness began to descend.

      As they came over Mitcham’s Hill and rounded the curve toward home, they were horrified for a split second, for their house was so ablaze with light they thought it was on fire, and they raised their eyes to God imploring that it be saved.  Then they realized the current was on, that life had just gotten immeasurably easier, and their imploring metamorphosed into thanksgiving.

     For with electricity, pumps could be put in wells and running water, including bathrooms, could be brought inside so folks didn’t have to “go out to Egypt” (what some folks called going to the privy) anymore, or draw well water with buckets any longer.  Smelly kerosene refrigerators could be replaced with clean-smelling electric ones, and old cast-iron wood stoves and newer kerosene ones could be replaced with electric appliances. 

       Those of us who remember pre-internet days have witnessed as big a technological change as our forebears did when electricity came.  But there seems to your compiler to be one big difference:  the benefits of electricity came almost instantly when they finally did come – except for air conditioning, which became common thirty years later –  while the benefits of the internet have been twenty years or more a-building to their current level.

     Your compiler thinks modern folks such as he really cannot conceive of what life was like before electricity, and would wager that nearly every rural family in the United States in those days had a story somewhat similar to that of his own family, for something as life-changing as electricity’s arrival would not be something one would be able to forget.  

It was probably almost Biblical in proportion: “…Darkness was upon the face of the deep…and God said Let there be light: and there was light.”