Matson Insurance has partnered with Jefferson County History Center to offer exploreJeffersonpa.com readers a look into Jefferson County’s past. Today, the evolution of lighting in Brookville is highlighted.
[The two gas lights that flicker in the medical office (courtesy of electric flicker lights) are two of the original gas lights once used in the building when Nathan Greene Edelblute and his family lived in the building that is now the Jefferson County History Center. (JCHS Photograph)]
Submitted by Carole Briggs:
LIGHTING
The History Center is housed in a building constructed by Nathan Greene Edelblute in 1875.
At first, it would have been heated with coal fires in all the rooms, but eventually, gas heating and lighting were installed. When the historical society preserved and adapted the building in 2001, we discovered several of the original gas lamps, stored them, electrified them, mounted them in our mining office (now a medical office), and inserted flickering bulbs to give the effect of gas lighting in a typical office at the turn of the century.
In fact, we’ve made an effort to show the evolution of lighting in our four-room replicas – candlelight in the cabin, daylight and a kerosene lantern in the woodworker’s shop (now the wagonmaker’s shop), gas lighting in the medical office, and kerosene lamps in the hunting camp.
Gas heating, then gas lighting ― we might suppose that eventually, gas light standards may have lined Main Street. The History Center has a long pole with a metal globe and wick at the end ― a lamplighter, and, someone at some time referred to a charcoal portrait of Isaac Vasbinder as the “old lamplighter.” Neither is verified as Brookville’s lamplighter and his light source.
Nevertheless, at dusk, it is picturesque to imagine the old lamplighter walking along with his long pole to light the street lamps.
Isaac Vasbinder died in 1902, and the development of electric power was right on the heels of the development of oil and natural gas. It wasn’t long before local entrepreneurs sold stock and established the Solar Electric Company. But, that’s another story.
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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