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Electric Lights for the Village
Electrical energy was not an entirely new phenomenon in the Richmond Hill of 1897. For some years, village residents had benefited from two of its earlier applications - the telegraph and the telephone. Sanderson's Drug Store had served as the local telegraph office since the early 1870s, and to make a long-distance telephone call, villagers stopped in at Skeele's Jewellery Store after a phone was installed there in the late 1880s. Richmond Hill's first telephone exchange was established at Sanderson's in 1905; by March of the following year, twenty-five local listings appeared in an eastern Ontario telephone directory.) But electric lighting was a much more dramatic and visible application of the new technology. With its generating station at Bond Lake and its utility poles and overhead wires stretching up and down Yonge Street as far as the eye could see, the Metropolitan Railway offered its surplus electricity for lighting and other energy needs. In April 1897, the Metropolitan advertised its wares by turning on four electric lights in its waiting room at Yonge Street and Lorne Avenue - the first electric lighting recorded in Richmond Hill. That August, as a public relations gesture, the company supplied electricity to light the new bandstand in the park east of the station. 12 The village council responded to the innovations with considerable caution. Not until October 1906, nearly a decade after the lights were turned on in the Metropolitan waiting room, did council express an interest in obtaining electrical power for street lighting and other purposes. A special committee made inquiries through 1908, but council took no action. Only when the Fire and Light Committee took charge in 1911 did the movement gain momentum. A heady round of public meetings and enabling bylaws followed. Local stores began advertising electric lighting fixtures. 13
The scheme was workable, but as so often happened in Richmond Hill's municipal life, it took a while for the project to get off the ground. "The matter drags on in a peaceful sleepy way, characteristic of our Village past and present," charged Frank Todd in a letter to The Liberal. "Unless somebody or something suddenly sets the alarm clock and wakes everybody up, it will continue, I am sorry to say, in future." 15 No one set an alarm clock, but progress was slowly made until, at 5:30 p.m. on Monday, December 30, electric streetlights came on in Richmond Hill.Savage's furniture store ("The People's Store") lit up that same evening; Sanderson's Drug Store and the Post Office turned on the juice the next night. 16 In March 1913, council established the Richmond Hill Electric Light and Power Commission, with Councillor J.H. Sanderson as its first chairman.
So
Richmond Hill's
decision to obtain power from the
Toronto and York Radial Railway Company prompted
criticism from certain outside quarters.
Richmond Hill is
being put on a side track," concluded the
Toronto Evening Telegram. Notes11. The Liberal,January 28, 1897. 12. Ibid., April 22, and August 19, 1897. 13. Ibid., January 4,January 11, and January 25, 1912. 17. Toronto Telegram,December 12, 1912; The Liberal,December 19, 1912.
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