He was a lineman for the county

By David Maurer

Published: August 24, 2008

Some heroes are defined not by brave deeds in battle, but by their actions in everyday life.

Surely the word hero applied to Jimmy Gardner, who left his warm bed on countless winter nights to restore power to homes throughout Nelson County. And he needed no small amount of courage to spike-foot his way up icy utility poles to work with a force that could kill him in an instant.

In the early 1930s, when Gardner was learning the linesman trade while working as an electrician at Virginia Tech, it was an extremely dangerous profession. Every other lineman who tried to harness the new technology was killed by it.

Today, the job still ranks in the top 10 most dangerous. Fortunately, there were always people like Gardner willing to step forward and replace their fallen peers. Thanks to these largely unheralded blue-collar heroes, even the most distant farmhouse can now have power and illumination with a flip of a switch.

But up until the late 1930s only about 10 percent of rural residents enjoyed the benefits of electricity. About the only places in Nelson County enjoying electricity in those days were near mills that were generating juice via waterpower.

“There was a water mill at Tyro that generated electricity,” said Greg Kelly, director of member services for Central Virginia Electric Cooperative. “The man who owned the mill gave the people in the immediate area power for their lights.

“But at night when he would be ready to go to bed, he would go to the mill. He’d then honk his car horn to let people know he was shutting the mill down and their lights were about to go out.

“Teddy Roosevelt was one of the first people to talk about electricity in the home being a basic right. That was an important shift in thinking, because up to that point many people thought it was just a novelty.”

By the time Roosevelt’s cousin, Franklin Delano Roosevelt, became the 32nd president of the nation, having electricity had become a matter of fairness and equality of opportunity. But the financial cost of running electrical lines through rural areas had been a showstopper for years.

“The investor-owned utilities naturally took the areas that had large industry or density of population,” Kelly said. “That meant they were going to have more electricity coming in and it was easier to capture their return on their investment.

“They had looked at doing electrification over rural lines, and said it couldn’t be done. They estimated that lines would cost more than $2,000 a mile.”

Interestingly, the Great Depression deserves a lot of the credit for getting electricity out into the countryside. In order to provide jobs and pump cash into the stagnant economy, enormous amounts of federal money flooded into social projects.

One of the projects was getting rural America wired with electricity. On May 11, 1935, the Rural Electrification Administration was created by executive order. Loans were offered first to investor-owned utilities to undertake the project. When they declined, the money was offered to rural residents who would start nonprofit electrical co-ops.

On Sept. 20, 1937, about 400 people attended a meeting at Lovingston High School that resulted in the formation of CVEC. Each person pledged $5 to get things going, and the newly formed co-op borrowed $100,000 from the government to string the first 129 miles of electric lines from Afton to the Forks of Buffalo in Amherst County.

One of the first tasks of the co-op was to crunch the numbers to see how much it was going to cost to run a mile of lines. With some design modification they were able to do it for less than $1,000 a mile.

Nonetheless, the rough mountainous terrain that dominates much of rural Nelson County presented a formidable challenge. Perkins and Barnes Construction Company felt it was up to the task.

Gardner was then working as an electric lineman with Virginia Public Service operating out of Crewe. He had been born in Floyd County in 1912 and learned to work on the family’s dairy farm.

Gardner was in his mid-20s when he made a social visit to the daughter of the man who owned Perkins and Barnes. The owner apparently took a liking to the young caller and convinced him to come work for him.

Gardner’s first job was to travel to the Northern Neck peninsula and help string electric lines there. It was demanding work that required the help of powerful oxen to haul utility poles through the swamps and marshes.

After homes in that area were twinkling brightly, Gardner moved his operation to the Shenandoah Valley. By the time he was brought to Nelson County in 1938 to start running power lines he had earned the rank of superintendent.

Gardner set pole No. 1 in Afton and then it was off to the races. By the end of that summer the first line was ready to be energized.

Now it was important to let potential Nelson County customers know that electricity was being made available to the folks in the area. As a form of advertisement Gardner set up a light near Farrar’s Store in Arrington.

At night, when people passed by the country store with the large Dr. Pepper logo painted on its wooden side, they would see the light shining brightly. It was a compelling symbol that proved electricity was at hand, it was safe and they could enjoy its benefits for just pennies a day.

Electricity was coming to Nelson County, but it still had a long ways to go. And in just a few years World War II would slow electrification to a crawl, and Gardner would join the Navy to serve a higher call.

Next: Getting the job done.