We don’t really think about it anymore when we walk into a room, we just flick a switch and the lights come on. But for the first 50 years of North Omaha’s development, that didn’t happen! [Adam’s note: Growing up in North O, sometimes that didn’t happen at my house either, but that was for other reasons.] Today, electrical power flows steadily throughout the community and powers homes, businesses, churches and a lot more. This is a history of electricity in North Omaha.
Lighting the Dark in Early North Omaha
Kerosene lamps, candles, oil lanterns, and stinky gas or propane lit up North O a long time before flip switches and power outlets were everywhere. Before electricity came in widely in the 1890s, our community was totally in the dark once the sun went down. That’s except for some areas of the Near North Side, North 33rd and Parker, and Florence, where they had gas street lamps that glowed until midnight.
The first electricity in Omaha was strung in 1860 with the electric telegraph. Almost 20 years later, in 1879, the first electric lights were demonstrated by a touring exhibition. Omaha started playing with electric street lights in the early 1880s when small companies like the Omaha Thomson-Houston Electric Light Company opened. They ran noisy dynamos and strung messy wires along dirt streets throughout the city.
Stores and hotels in downtown began installing small lights, and electricity was first distributed to some houses in 1883. The first electric streetlights in Omaha were brought in by the Northwestern Electric Light Company in 1883, when they installed 20 streetlights downtown, and north of Dodge Street at North 11th and Capitol, California, Burt, and Izard. That year, the company told the city council “The net difference in the cost to the city between twenty arc lamps and one hundred twenty gas lamps would give ten times the light of the gas lamps.” They were basically saying that even if the line-item cost to operate twenty electric arc lamps ends up roughly equal to (or only slightly different from) what you currently pay the gas company to fuel, maintain, and light 120 gas posts, you will come out way ahead because the public will get ten times more illumination per taxpayer dollar spent.
These early companies didn’t care much about regular working-class neighborhoods, and soon mostly ran wires to wealthy downtown businesses, big hotels, and mansions along North 16th Street and Florence Boulevard. The upscale Kountze Place and Bemis Park neighborhoods had some of the first electrical street lamps in North Omaha, while the rest of our community was left with dim gas lamps on wooden poles at best. Florence actually had its first citywide electricity following streetlight installation in 1903, which then led to the houses and buildings in the year afterward. Provided by the Omaha Electric Light & Power Company, the company was boosted as having “an inexhaustible fund of power.” The original electric streetlights in Florence were on Main Street (N. 30th) at State, Jefferson, Clay, and Fillmore. The first additional one was installed at Main and Willit Streets.
A young entrepreneur named John E. Reagan (1867-1943) started the first business called the Omaha Electric Light and Power Company in 1885. Building a small generating plant downtown, he powered the Near North Side south of Paul Street. But running a standalone electric plant in the late 1880s was really hard, and Reagan sold off off the company’s holdings in 1889…