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In
1917, the all-male voting population of Burnet
elected Ophelia (Birdie) Crosby Harwood the first female mayor in
the United States. Most rural women of the time didn’t have that kind
of opportunity and the reason they didn’t was because they didn’t
have electricity.
From those hardscrabble times came Lyndon Johnson, whose first campaign
promise was to bring electricity to the Hill
Country and rural Texas. LBJ’s grandfather
was Sam Ealy Johnson, who bought some land along the Pedernales
River in 1882 and settled there with his wife Eliza. The future
president would be born in a small white ranch house on that property
on August 27, 1908.
Sam Ealy Johnson, Sr. became partners with his brother Tom in a cattle
operation after the Civil War. The war had greatly increased the number
of unattended cattle
running loose all over the state at a time when a steer worth $6 to
$10 in Texas was bringing $30-$40 in
Kansas City. The Johnson brothers commenced running cattle
to Kansas and cashing in on the bonanza.
Lyndon Johnson grew up listening to stories from his grandfather about
the rewards and perils of trailing an unruly herd of Longhorns
north, of stampedes and dangerous river crossings. He heard how his
grandmother, Eliza, paralyzed and bed-ridden when LBJ knew her, was
alone in the house with an infant when the Indians came calling. She
stuffed a handkerchief in the baby’s mouth to keep its cries from
being heard and hid under a trap door while Indians ransacked the
house above.
His grandfather died not long after Lyndon and his family moved to
Johnson City,
where he lived until he left to attend college in San
Marcos. Johnson ran for Congress in 1937 to fill the 10th Congressional
seat left vacant by the death of James Buchanan. Running on the promise
to use electricity from dams being built in the Hill
Country to bring electricity to that region, he defeated nine
other candidates in a hotly contested primary.
As
Johnson biographer Robert Caro pointed out, “Without electricity,
even boiling water was work.” Water was hauled by hand from a well
or creek and carried to the house. It took about 40 gallons of water
a day to run a farm, which meant a lot of trips from the well to the
house. Lyndon’s reluctance to help his mother with pumping and hauling
water was a source of constant friction between the future president
and his father, Sam Ealy Johnson, Jr.
To boil the water, wood had to be cut and hauled to house where it
was burned in wood-burning stoves that were notoriously slow to “start
up” and were also known for covering the inside of the house in soot
and ash. Once the stoves finally heated up, they made the house feel
like a furnace, especially in the middle of an already heat-brutal
summer.
The stoves had to be lit not only to boil water but for cooking and
canning. At least twice a day during canning, the ash container had
to be wrestled outside, emptied and brought back. “And when the housewife
wasn’t bending down to the flames, she was standing over them,” Caro
wrote.
Laundry had to be done year-round. The clothes were washed outside
where a huge vat of boiling water was suspended over another fire.
Clothes were scrubbed in one tub with handmade lye soap and swished
around by means of broomstick or paddle. From there the clothes went
into a rinse tub and from there to a bluing pan and then to the starching,
which completed one of what was usually four or so loads a week. The
tubs had to be changed too, which took about eight gallons of water.
Many
of the Hill Country
women that Caro talked to told him that of all the chores that befell
them, ironing was the most onerous. “Washing was hard work, but ironing
was the worst,” one woman said. “Nothing could ever be as hard as
ironing.”
Wielding an iron in those days meant tossing around six or seven-pound
wedges of iron, often without handles, that had to be heated over
a fire, where soot sometimes accumulated and, despite every effort,
sent another garment back to the original washing tub. Also despite
every effort, women burned their hands from time to time, which didn’t
excuse them from hauling six and seven-pound loads of clothes around
all day.
“The women of the Hill
Country never called the instruments they used every Tuesday ‘irons,’
they called them ‘sad irons,’” Caro wrote.
Life was like that for people in the country because in the 1930s
only 2.3 percent of the farms in Texas
had electricity. Thirty years later, only two percent were without
it. In between came the Rural Electrification Act of 1938, part of
President Franklin Roosevelt’s New Deal program, and electricity for
rural America. Life would never be the same again for Hill
Country women, and that was a good thing.
© Clay Coppedge
"Letters from Central Texas"
September 10, 2010 Column |
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