A Look Back: First Electric Power Had An “Oh shucks” Corny Ambiance
By O.K. Carter, Landmark Preservation Commission
Posted on April 16, 2019, April 16, 2019

Corn Field

It seemed wasteful to corn-shelling plant owner A.W. Collins that thousands of corn shucks had to be thrown away, so much so that he came up with an electric idea: Use the shucks and stripped cobbs as fuel to provide new-fangled electricity.

Collins did exactly that in 1904, providing Arlington with its first electricity. While other pioneer cities typically used off-line ice plants or cotton gins to generate electricity part-time, Arlington took what might be described as a cornier path to lighting its homes and businesses.

It was an on-again, off-again deal. At dusk, when the day’s shelling work was finished, the belt of the steam engine was switched to an electric dynamo to provide lights for about 50 downtown stores and a few homes. When Collins ran out of corn cobbs, he mixed lignite coal with other scraps of flammable materials from his plant located near South and Center streets.

The plant provided electricity for lights only, running sundown to 11 p.m. weekdays, midnight on Saturday. It also ran from 5 a.m. to sunup so early risers would have lights. There were no meters so customers paid a small fee for each bulb.

Collins liked the electricity business and in 1906 he and three partners – W.C. Weeks, W.M. Dugan and Col. Tom Spruance – invested $10,000 to build the city a larger plant, extending wires to more homes, all 220-volt direct current. It was still part-time service until 1913 when the electric system was purchased by the Northern Traction Company, which also ran the Interurban. The company used new-fangled alternating current at 115 volts. 

Convinced by then that electricity was here to stay, Arlington Journal Publisher W.A. Bowen became the first industrial user of electricity in the city, buying a large electric motor to power his big press.
That original electric plant at Handley has been much-modified and enlarged over the years, but is still operating today. Texas Electric bought the system in 1930.

This article was written by Arlington author and historian O.K. Carter, who serves on the Landmark Preservation Commission.

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