Philipsburg was first PA town with electric streetlights. It wants the world to know
Editor’s note: This story is part of a series highlighting unique parts of Centre County history as the nation celebrates its 250th anniversary. Look for more stories through the summer at CentreDaily.com.
Paul Springer was ticked off.
A few years ago, he told someone from Northumberland County that his native Philipsburg was the first town in the commonwealth to have an electric streetlight. Springer’s conversation partner retorted, in his recollection, “Well, geez, they got a sign hanging up in Milton, Shamokin, saying that they’re the first place to have electricity in Pennsylvania.”
So Springer went digging. The Philipsburg Historical Foundation board member, whose grandfather had told him about the town’s electrification when he was younger, found a Philipsburg Journal article in the archives headlined “ELECTRIC LIGHT.”
“On last Tuesday night our city was illuminated with electricity for the first time,” the article read. “We feel proud, every man, woman and child belonging to Philipsburg have a just right to feel proud, that they live in the most enterprising city, without any exception, in the State, for it is the first to have its streets and business houses lighted with electric light.”
The article, which didn’t make the front page, was dated Oct. 6, 1882. The historical marker in question, actually located in Northumberland County’s seat of Sunbury, said its electric light system “was made July 4, 1883.”
“Sure enough, we were ahead of them by nine months,” Springer said. As the Journal put it in 1882, “Put that in your pipes and smoke it.”
Springer and the historical foundation are on a quest to have a historical marker installed in Philipsburg proclaiming it the first town in Pennsylvania with municipal electric lighting. The marker, if approved, would be the borough’s second from the state and another testament to its former industrial glory.
The electrification of Philipsburg came about quickly. A farm outside the borough received electric light in 1878 via water power, and in August 1882, an electric company that would eventually become Penelec was formed to service Philipsburg. Legend has it that the company’s treasurer, J.N. Casanova, smuggled the generator that would power Philipsburg out of Cuba as it battled Spain for independence, though Springer couldn’t independently verify the claim.
Philipsburg was among the earliest adopters of the electric streetlight, perfected the decade prior by Ohio inventor Charles F. Brush. Brush’s arc light, the Journal wrote in August 1882, would have the power of 2,000 candles and “take the place of the annoying and not unfrequently dangerous coal oil lamp.”
“It’s amazing,” Springer said. “The cities that were ahead were, like, San Francisco and huge places, cities, not little places like Phillipsburg.”
The evening the lights flickered on, hundreds of people were in town “watching the races,” presumably at the horse track once located near where the U.S. Route 322 bypass is today. They and the townspeople gathered around the streetlights for “the dawn of this new enterprise.”
“At half past six a faint sputtering noise was noticable to those near a lamp, and in a second after, the success of the enterprise was proven beyond all dispute for every lamp blazed forth in all its splendor,” the Journal wrote. The streets, it continued, “were now all ablaze with a light that is only surpassed by daylight.”
A marker commemorating the electric lighting of Philipsburg, if approved, could be dedicated as early as spring 2027, said Alli Davis, the Pennsylvania Historical and Museum Commission’s historical marker coordinator.
Sunbury’s sign, meanwhile, recently had its title updated from “First Electric Light” to “First Three-Wire Electric Lighting. Its system was created by Thomas Edison.
“What Edison did in Sunbury was the first commercial illumination of a building,” said David Ruths, the president of the Northumberland County Historical Society. “They weren’t doing streetlights in Sunbury.”
Ruths didn’t have any hard feelings about the sign being updated.
“We’re always wanting to go with what the facts are,” he said.
