How Did Americans Live After Dark Before Electricity?

One night in the early 1870s, a twelve-year-old Iowa farm boy was shaken awake at one in the morning and sent five miles through the rain for the doctor, with a single lantern he had to blow out before he rode. Before the switch on the wall, the dark came at half past four in winter, and every hour of light after that cost money, oil and work. Hamlin Garland's memoir, an 1869 household manual and a 1920 government survey of ten thousand farm women show what families actually did between sundown and bed, who cleaned the lamps every morning, and how long the farm stayed dark after the cities were lit. Which would you hate most: wiping the soot off the lamp chimneys every single morning, getting up at five in the dark, or riding five miles for the doctor with no light at all? Tell me in the comments. NOTES ON THE RECORD Garland gives no year or month for the ride to the doctor; it falls between his 1871 and 1874 chapters, so we say "the early 1870s". He does not describe his father's illness, so we don't either. Garland wrote in 1917, looking back about 45 years. The 1919-20 farm-woman survey numbers (79% with kerosene lamps to trim and fill, an 11.3-hour working day) come from a 1920 newspaper report of the USDA release. The December sunset time for Osage, Iowa is computed from standard NOAA solar formulas. The Kentucky farmer's account of the night the lights came on was published by the USDA in 1960; it gives the month, not the year. Things we could not confirm, and so do not state: a dated price for kerosene, a national count of lamp deaths, and a usual farm bedtime. SOURCES Hamlin Garland, A Son of the Middle Border (Macmillan, 1917). Project Gutenberg #28791. Catharine E. Beecher and Harriet Beecher Stowe, The American Woman's Home (1869). Project Gutenberg #6598. USDA farm-woman survey directed by Florence E. Ward, 1919-20, as reported in a South Carolina newspaper, September 9, 1920 (South Carolina Digital Newspaper Program). USDA Rural Electrification Administration, Rural Lines - USA: The Story of the REA's First Twenty-five Years, 1935-1960 (Misc. Publication 811, 1960). Federal Writers' Project, American Life Histories, Library of Congress: Marie Haggerty (Worcester, Mass., 1939); Mrs. Frank Mitchell (Amarillo, Texas, 1938).