I was in the grocery store this week when the lights went off and suddenly the room was flooded with darkness. Having my cell phone in hand – because that’s where my grocery list resides – my first thought was that I could turn on the flashlight function and easily finish my shopping. Then I realized that the registers would not be working so there would be no way to scan and tally the cost, much less pay for the food with my handy-dandy debit card.

Well the blackout was very short, I turned off my flashlight, finished filling my basket and the clerk was ready to take my plastic payment. You won’t be surprised that it made me wonder about shopping in the pre-electric days – which I often remind you really wasn’t all that long ago.

Undated picture of Peter’s Store at Clarkrange.

The Tennessee Valley Authority was established in 1933 – just 87 years ago. While we may often think of them only as our source of electricity, in fact, the original mandate was “environmental stewardship and economic development.” It wouldn’t be until the 1940’s that the mandate was applied to lighting the valley – and surrounding mountains. The main roadways of the Cumberland Plateau saw power lines by the early 1940’s. In 1936 Congress passed the Rural Electrification Act and Volunteer Electric Cooperative utilized the federal loans that act provided and began stringing power lines in Meigs County. Their website says in 1940 they served 3,631 customers.

The Plateau’s secondary roadways wouldn’t get electricity until the late forties and even into the early sixties there were areas that still had not been reached.

Understanding all of that shocking history, I’m always wondering what was life like as recently as 1920 or 1930? And I mean the basic functions of life – meals, church services, school and even the weekly shopping trip.

We’ve talked here before that stores of yester-year were very different than the mega-centers we see today. Even small grocery stores – like the one that fell dark on me last week – hardly resemble the general stores that my grandparents grew up visiting. Today we walk through numerous aisles, choosing products from rows and rows of shelves. The self-serve movement seems to be taking on a whole new purpose as I’m seeing cashiers removed from these stores as customers are expected to also take care of the check-out process.

In days gone by only a tiny portion of the merchandise was set out before customers and the vast majority was stocked behind counters where hard working clerks filled orders. Early on those clerks actually measured and weighed out bulk products, from coffee beans to coal oil, rural homes could usually buy anything essential to their daily lives. What wasn’t carried by the merchant could be ordered from a couple of mail order catalogs and often delivered to that local store.

Back to the question of electricity – just how was all that business conducted without power?

The first idea that comes to mind is shopping on these overcast or rainy, winter days. You know those days where you burn the lights the whole day long. If you could get into the store on those days, the clerk (who often lived in the back room of the store) knew his way around that store as well as you know your own home. With the lamp lit on the counter, he could pretty readily go about his business. No need to worry about the check-out process. If he could see his table (of paper) he could jot down the prices and tally up your bill. A tab was often held to be paid when crops or stock was sold, but if you had the cash to pay that day, it could be counted in the dim light and no credit card transaction was necessary.

And I wonder if you could even get to the store on those days – the kind of February days we’ve been enjoying in Tennessee recently. Plateau roads were mostly mud, automobiles were scarce until the 1940’s and rainy weather largely kept folks close to home - not to mention a snow storm.