Guest post by Rob Wilson
Hatfield Historical Society volunteer

This Dec. 23, at Hatfield’s Annual Luminarium celebration, thousands of flickering homemade candle lanterns will line sidewalks and driveways and shine from front door stoops. Once the wicks burn down and splutter out, however, it will be back to using electric-powered lights to push back the winter night. To truly appreciate that luxury, look back for a moment on the times before a click of an electric switch could turn darkness into light. The history of illuminating Hatfield—from Colonial-era candle and lamp light all the way to the electrical service we all enjoy today— offers some interesting examples of how evolving science and technology have significantly changed our lives.

From the time pioneers of European heritage settled in the area and eventually founded Hatfield, in 1670, and all the way into the 1850s, town residents lit up their homes with candles and lamps that burned oil. The various lamps made light from animal fats (oil derived from beef and sheep fat, when mixed together, burned best), beeswax, fish oil and whale oil. Candles were used less as lamps became more efficient and brighter. Whale oil, which burned brighter and cleaner than its counterparts, was the high-end lighting choice for much of that time period, but because of its cost was  mostly used in wealthier households.  
 
In the mid-1800s, scientists developed a process for making lamp oil from coal, and kerosene was born. As manufacturing processes were improved, kerosene became more affordable and its use for lighting became widespread. As they lit their lamps, however, Hatfield residents, wished for a brighter and easier means of lighting their homes. “The lampshade or chimney had to be washed daily and the kerosene filled when necessary,” observed Nellie Donnis Gutfinski in her memoir about Hatfield life, Times Remembered: Growing Up in the Donnis Household. “One could smell the kerosene when the lamp was in use.” That odor permeated her house until the early 1920s, Nellie remembered, until electric lines finally reached her neighborhood and her house was wired.
 
A brighter, cleaner and less odoriferous alternative to the kerosene lamp actually had been introduced to town residents in the late 1860s: gas lighting. Small gas-producing systems usually were utilized to light a single building. There was one catch, however. Only Hatfield’s well-off households and businesses could afford to upgrade.

The Lowell Mansion, built in 1868 on Elm Street, utilized one of the expensive home-based systems. The machinery used gravity-driven technology to pump air through a petroleum-based liquid, producing a burnable gas that it collected and pushed through pipes to wall fixtures and ornamental sconces. Gas flame was considerably brighter than the light of an oil lamp. Although the system was replaced by electric lights a century ago, the mansion’s gas fixtures remain as a reminder of a largely forgotten past. 
 
A much more affordable form of gas lighting became available to some Hatfield residents in the early 20th century. Coal gas had been produced in commercial gasworks, delivered to customers in underground pipes, and used to light large American cities and towns since 1816. Later in the century, the more flammable and brighter burning acetylene gas was introduced. As large-scale gas-making technology advanced, small towns began installing systems and laying pipes.
 
It’s unclear exactly when that type of gas lighting first was utilized in Hatfield. According to A History of Hatfield in Three Parts, by Daniel White Wells and Reuben Field Wells, published in 1910, the town’s first streetlights were erected in the 1890s, “at intervals along several of the streets in the center of the village and the lamps were lit and cared for by property owners on whose places they were located.” However, the author did not mention if they burned gas or some other fuel.
 
The first Hatfield gas-making facility that Wells mentions began making acetylene gas in 1901, to light the Congregational Church. Perhaps inspired by the success of the church’s system, Wells teamed with several wealthy peers, in 1903, to finance and build an acetylene gasworks on Prospect Street.

 Incorporated as the Hatfield Gas Works in 1904, the facility used a process that forced calcium carbide through water, captured the resulting gas, and then piped it to customers. Awarded a contract to provide gas for the town’s streetlamps, the company laid underground gas pipes and also began to service some homes and businesses.
 
Electric power arrived in Hatfield in 1907, delivered by lines spanned across the Connecticut River by the Amherst Gas Co., one of the many American gas utilities to expand into delivering electrical service. Streetlights burning incandescent light bulbs began to supplant the town’s gas lamps and, as Wells noted in his History of Hatfield, the new and ever-growing electric infrastructure soon extended beyond the reach of his company’s acetylene gas pipes.
 
The expansion of electric service in Hatfield was costly, however, and it proceeded slowly. Hatfield Gas Co., taken over by the larger Massachusetts Lighting Co. in 1909, was able to expand its customer base, as more households within reach of the plant’s delivery system adopted gas for cooking and some lighting. A statewide report on electric utilities revealed that the company jumped its 1912 sales by 36% from its 1909-1910 figure, to $46,550. Adjusted for inflation, today that amount would translate to about $1,244,000.
 
Yet the heyday of localized production of coal and acetylene gas for lighting purposes was over. Over the next three decades, more and more Hatfield households began lighting with electricity. Once electric power was delivered to a home, it was carried room-to-room by “knob and tube” (K&T) wiring (see illustration).

Electric current traveled to a light fixture or a wall outlet in one insulated copper wire and returned on a separate parallel wire. The wires were three or four inches apart and each was secured to walls and ceilings with a series of non-conducting porcelain knobs that were affixed with a nail. The wire ran through walls and wooden beams and joists in a porcelain tube.
 
Although K&T signaled a revolution in home lighting and living, the service it provided was Spartan compared with today’s electrical wiring. Pat (Labbee) Cady remembered visiting her grandparents’ house (now 60 School St.) as a child. It featured “one ungrounded outlet upstairs, and sconces in the living room that were originally for kerosene,” as well as “extension cords under carpets.” Hatfield resident Al Rejniak, in another interview, described the early electrical setup in his home: “All we had was one pull chain, hanging in the middle of each room, no outlets.” 
 
Many residents of outlying Hatfield neighborhoods had a decades-long wait for electric lines and service. Others waited until they could better afford it. North Hatfield’s Paul Vachula family wasn’t able to trade their kerosene lamps for electric lights until 1928. At least some homes on Dwight Street and the Marcinowski Farm on Valley Street didn’t get electric lights until the mid-1930s. But electricity had arrived and was here to stay. And as a result, life in Hatfield – in spite of all the pull chains and extension cords – got a whole lot easier.
 

Rob Wilson is the former executive director of the Veterans Education Project, a nonprofit based in Amherst, MA, and resides in Hatfield, MA.

Guest post by Rob Wilson
Hatfield Historical Society volunteer
 
In observance of the 77th anniversary of the Dec. 7, 1941, attack on Pearl Harbor and the entry of the United States into World War II, we highlight the important contributions women from Pioneer Valley communities — including Hatfield — made on the home front at the Springfield Armory. The author drew on his research as an educational consultant for the Springfield Armory National Historic Site, as well as interviews Hatfield Historical Museum volunteers conducted with WWII-era Hatfield residents in 2015, in conjunction with our 2015 WWII exhibit in the Historical Museum.

Marion Howes felt she needed to do something. Pearl Harbor had been bombed Dec. 7, 1941. The United States responded by declaring war upon Japan Dec. 8. War declarations on Germany and Italy followed Dec. 11. “I’ve got to do my part. Where can I do it?” Marion remembered asking herself as the nation mobilized for a long struggle on two fronts, across the Atlantic and in the Pacific. She wanted to do something significant yet stay close to home, and “the Springfield Armory was the only place around.”

A Greenfield resident at the time (she would later marry WWII veteran Walter Root and move to Hatfield with him in 1988), 20-year-old Marion traveled to Springfield and began training to become one of the Armory’s more than 5,000 Women Ordnance Workers (WOWs) making weapons parts and accessories. The federally-run Springfield Armory was the largest military weapons manufacturer in the region.  When the war ended, she continued to work for the Armory, on an off, for 20 years.
 
Marion spoke with Hatfield Historical Museum interviewer Marta Bilodeau in 2015 about her post-Pearl Harbor decision to work at the Armory.  She was 96 years old when she passed away earlier this year.

Founded in 1794 as the nation’s first armory, the Springfield Armory already had a storied legacy by 1941 (various models of the Springfield rifle had been a staple of U.S. Army infantry gear since 1855). During WWII, more than 3.5 million M1 Model Springfield Rifles were designed and manufactured there, surpassing the facility’s rifle production total since its founding. Closed in 1968 as weapons manufacturing transferred entirely to the private sector, the Armory became a National Historic Site (NHS) and a museum managed by the National Park Service in 1978.
 
Breaking gender barriers
There never had been so many women on the Armory payroll.  During World War I, for example, only 15% of the employees were women, many of them assigned to office positions. At the peak of World War II, they comprised 42% of the 12,000-employee workforce and most were helping to manufacture weapons.  On the factory floor, many WOWs wore red bandanas with the distinctive markings of a flaming bomb, one of the insignias for the U.S. Army’s Ordnance Corps. The bandanas were both a safety precaution and a symbol to help instill camaraderie, pride and achievement in their contributions to the war effort.

And proud of their work they were. Talking about her job to Marta Bilodeau in an interview on Sept. 11, 2015, Marion recalled “it wasn’t that enjoyable, but knowing you were doing [a war-related] job, that was the whole thing.” She worked making ammunition clips for the M1 semi-automatic rifle. Each clip held eight rounds of ammunition. Describing the manufacturing process, she explained how she and the other WOWs in her department would run flat metal stock “through a big press where it’s formed into clips, then goes through various stages,” dipped in rust preventative then inspected, packed and shipped out. She and the other women in her department “did the whole thing, beginning to end.”
 
By working in skilled manufacturing jobs, Marion and other WOWs were breaking gender barriers that, until the late 1930s, had always existed in American industry. Traditionally, the machine shop and the factory floor were the exclusive province of white men. As America geared up for war in 1941 and faced a labor shortage, President Franklin Delano Roosevelt issued an Executive Order that barred job discrimination on the basis of gender or race in federal workplaces.  It was an exciting time, remembered Harriet Atwood, a former WOW who spoke to me in an interview for a Springfield Armory NHS oral history project.  “Women learned to do things they didn't know they could do," the Springfield native said, adding that some men remained critical of women taking industrial jobs. As the war progressed, however, and WOWs often excelled at their jobs, many of the skeptics began to accept the women as the skilled workers they were. 
 
The female presence in manufacturing shops, the Armory February 1942 newsletter noted, rapidly triggered noticeable changes in workplace culture. In the prewar all-male manufacturing departments “the air was often dark blue, shot with flashes of lightening,” the reporter wrote, with a touch of tongue-in-cheek humor. “But now that the ladies are here conversation is kept low and business in the jobbing shop office is conducted in peaceful, churchly quiet.”

Margaret Barrett was about 18 years old when the war started. She went to work in the metal finishing department at the Armory in 1943. I had read about the department’s supervisor, Wilbur Ancrum, one of the few black machinists at the Armory prior to the war. During a visit with Margaret’s sister Ruth Barrett Drury in Hatfield (who was very active with the Hatfield Historical Society in the 1970s and ’80s and who passed away in 2017), I learned about the young WOW’s experience working in the shop. Ruth was donating her deceased sister’s most treasured memento to the Springfield Armory museum: a set of heavy candlesticks, milled out of the brass used for shell casings and weapons parts.  Wilbur Ancrum, her boss, had custom made them for her when she left her job at war’s end. A gesture of comradeship and thanks for a job well done, the candlesticks also seemed to be symbols of the barriers of de facto gender and racial segregation that began to come down within the Armory workplace. 

While interviewing former WOWs for the Springfield Armory NHS, I heard more stories of the working relationships and friendships between whites and African Americans, as well as between male and female Armory workers. As WWII wound down, and armaments demand decreased, many women left voluntarily or were laid off. Some went on to skilled positions in domestic industries or, others— like Marion (Howes) Root— went back to work at the Armory during the Korean War. She also worked there one more stint after that. Significant color and gender barriers had been breached by home front workers, and local women were part of this big step toward workplace diversity.

Rob Wilson is the former executive director of the Veterans Education Project, a nonprofit based in Amherst, MA, and he resides in Hatfield, MA.