Matson Insurance has partnered with Jefferson County History Center to offer exploreJeffersonpa.com readers a look into Jefferson County’s past. Today, Brookville’s traffic lights are highlighted.
[Pictured above: The traffic lights or “light standards” as they were once called and that were in use a century ago were quite different from the traffic lights we use today. (JCHC Collection)]
(Submitted by Carole Briggs.)
Traffic Lights
Our research into the erection of stoplights on Main Street is conflicting.
One newspaper source tells us that during the summer of 1901, the electric company was busy “extending lines preparatory to erecting the street lights.”
Later, a newspaper item states that “early in 1915 the Brookville borough council looked forward to the installation of electric lighting on Main Street.” Were electric lights first installed in 1901 at the curb, then replaced in 1915 with lights at the intersections? Or might the company have run into snags that caused an almost fifteen-year delay? Or is there confusion between streetlights and stoplights?
What we do know is that prior to the installation of the intersection lights or “light standards” as they were called then, the borough council enacted an ordinance prescribing traffic rules and regulations.
Types of vehicles included not only automobiles but wagons, motorcycles, bicycles, traction engines, wagons, buggies, carriages, and “all kinds of conveyances, regardless of motive power, used for the transportation of persons or the conveyance or hauling of all articles and things capable of being so conveyed or hauled.”
Vehicles were to keep to the right of the center line, “which center line is marked by electric light stands at street and alley intersections.”
Photographs and postcards in the History Center’s collections show these “light stands” at the intersections of White and Main, Diamond Alley and Main, Pickering and Main, Spring Alley and Main, and Franklin and Main. They were, indeed, smack dab in the middle of these intersections.
A recent conversation with a local resident old enough to remember brought up the information that an intersection light was also installed on the south end of the Pickering Street bridge.
How long would it take before a vehicle would collide with one of the new electric light stands?
Not long, but it wasn’t a motorized vehicle. The Jeffersonian Democrat reported, “A team took fright and ran away. The wagon hit the light post, jarring it so that one or two of the globes were broken. No further damage of any account was done.”
Copyright@Jefferson County Historical Society, Inc.
Throwback Thursday is brought to you by Matson Insurance in Brookville.
Submitted by the Jefferson County History Center.
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