We had no power in the Encampment and Saratoga areas for roughly 22 hours over the weekend. I thought briefly about the things I could do with no power – like clean the house – but I successfully resisted that opportunity.
What I actually did is take a nap. Well, actually two of them and both were completely guilt-free.
What I noticed most about the lack of electricity was not the dark – I had plenty of candles and oil lamps to provide light – but it was the quiet.
On Saturday evening there was no wind outside. In the house, without the regular sounds like the hum of the refrigerator, it was silent except for the popping of wood as it burned in the wood stove we use for heat.
That stove came in handy to heat the pot of soup I’d made for dinner on Saturday night. And it was a place to cook breakfast on Sunday as well. Had I been more desperate there were many options for cooking: the wood cookstove down in Grandma’s Cabin, the gas grill outside on the deck, or even the propane stove in our camper.
When the temperature in the refrigerator wasn’t really cold enough to keep food safely, we took some perishable items outside and stuck them in a snowbank.
The line crews from Carbon Power & Light weren’t sitting around – or taking a nap – while this outage was occurring. They started work to identify the issue, which turned out to be a major equipment failure at the Trowbridge substation. Then, working with partners at Tri-State, they labored non-stop to restore the power.
Was this outage unusual? Absolutely, we are fortunate in the CP&L service area that we have few outages, and they are usually short of a few hours or less. This 22-hour outage was one of the longest I can remember.
But it is not nearly near as long as the record longest outage in the Encampment area. That one lasted 25 years!
Encampment and Riverside had electrical power early in the 1900s as a result of major mining operations in the area.
By 1903 power for electric lights was generated for those towns by operations at the Penn-Wyoming Copper Company Smelter.
Henry C. Beeler described the operation at the smelter in 1904 noting that all power in the smelter is “electric except the blowers and air compressors, which are driven direct from water power obtained from the Grand Encampment River. Twelve hundred horse power can be developed in this plant.”
Beeler added, “The water drives 5 water wheels, some of which connect direct with the concentrating mill by shafting and a drive to the crushers, tables and other machinery. Others are connected direct to the electric plant, which… lights the works and the town of Grand Encampment and Riverside.”
At that time, the Grand Encampment Mining District was in full development with copper mines throughout the Sierra Madre range. Ore from the Ferris-Haggarty, Doane-Rambler, and other mines was transported to the smelter using a 16-mile-long aerial tramway.
The power generated from the water works at the smelter continued flowing to the two towns with intermittent stoppage due to fires at the smelter in 1906, 1907, and 1908. But each time Penn-Wyoming rebuilt and power was restored.
Penn-Wyoming Company sold to United Smelters Railway and Copper Company in 1909, and there was limited production that year. But by then the price of copper had dropped and other economic issues caused the smelter to cease operations. It did not operate in 1910 and never operated again.
The power – and therefore the lights – went out in Grand Encampment. It took 25 years for them to come back on – making our 22-hour outage over the weekend pale by comparison.
Hoyt Parkison, who had been born in Grand Encampment in 1902 where his parents operated a mercantile and other businesses, returned to the community in 1932. He had left the town to pursue an education and to work for a time as an engineer in California.
Once back in Encampment with his wife Hila and infant son Ed Hoyt, the engineer watched as his mother and his wife scrubbed clothes by hand, pressed them with gasoline irons, and hauled rugs outside to beat and clean them with a boom.
Parkison decided to use his engineering training to make life easier. He constructed a hydroelectric plant near an old shingle mill just east of Riverside to supply power to his family. He paid $5 a month and provided free electrical power to the Peryam family that owned the mill in exchange for the use of the property.
In June of 1935, Parkison expanded his service to the entire community. The Encampment Echo reported, “Commercial ‘Juice’ was put in the line into town from the Parkison Electric Light Plant on the Peryam place last Friday evening. The plant worked perfectly and the places wired and connected shone forth in all the glory modern high power electric lamps can give.”
The Parkison light plant provided power for Riverside and Encampment until 1941, when it sold to the newly-organized Rural Electric Cooperative, that became Carbon Power & Light Inc. And with few interruptions, the lights have remained on ever since thanks to CP&L crews.
Candy Moulton can be reached at Candy.L.Moulton@gmail.com
