By Ellen Crawford
The Forum

Dorothy Kruse's in-laws loved coffee.

So she did the only thing possible when they visited her farm northeast of Kindred, N.D., one particularly hot, humid day in the early 1930s, even though it would heat up the kitchen unbearably. She fired up the wood stove to brew a pot.

City dwellers began receiving electricity before the turn of the century, first for lights and then appliances such as stoves, toasters, washing machines and refrigerators. But electric lines didn't reach rural Cass County until June 1938, releasing the Kruses and their neighbors from the drudgery of farm life

Before electricity, rural Americans pumped and hauled water, washed clothes, and fed and watered livestock by hand. They cooked over a wood-burning stove unless they were lucky enough to have gas or wind-powered generators - or rich enough to have power lines strung to their farm.

"Which farmer could do that in those days?" wonders Brad Schmidt, a vice president at Cass County Electric Cooperative.

Electricity changed lives in hundreds of ways, both big and small.

"Imagine having a stove that didn't heat up the kitchen," says the 95-year-old Kruse, who lives in Moorhead. "Imagine having an electric iron instead of the old-fashioned sadirons that had to be heated on the stove. Imagine light whenever you wanted it."

Kruse remembers the thrill of using strings of lights to decorate the Christmas tree the first December they had electricity.

"I was certainly happy to use them instead of candles," she says.

Electricity came earlier

By 1938 Fargo-Moorhead residents had enjoyed electrical power for more than half a century. Fargo officials granted the first franchises for light and gas in 1881 and those companies served Moorhead as well.

Fargo's earliest street lighting came from two 160-foot-high lighting towers that, according to city specifications, had to be bright enough so people could read "coarse print" a half-mile away.

In 1883, Moorhead entered into a contract with the Red River Manufacturing Co. to provide the city with carbon arc streetlights.

A second electric company started in Fargo in 1888 and the following year it and the first light and gas companies consolidated, forming the Fargo Gas and Electric Co.

Moorhead started a community-owned power plant in 1895 to free itself from its reliance on Fargo's privately-owned plant. Moorhead still operates a municipal utility.

Another competitor, the Hughes Electric Co., moved into Fargo in 1898 and changed its name to the Fargo Edison Co. in 1900.

Competition became fierce. The two Fargo companies tried to steal customers from each other. Even their power poles weren't safe from theft.

Three years later the two companies merged into the Union Light, Heat and Power Co.. Consumers Power Co. acquired Union in 1910. Consumers Power became Northern States Power Co., the Fargo area's current electricity supplier, in 1916, but the city's electric, gas and heating plants continued operating under the Union name until 1937, when the company merged with NSP.

Rural electrification

Kruse's father, Max Strehlow, a Kindred pharmacist, banker and landowner, was instrumental in bringing electricity to much of rural Cass County. President Franklin D. Roosevelt signed an executive order in 1935 that created the Rural Electrification Administration, a program to generate and distribute electricity to rural America. Strehlow won a seat in the North Dakota Legislature the same year to make sure rural North Dakota would see the light.

The REA became a loan agency, lending federal money mainly to cooperatives formed by people who wanted electricity in their area. The REA Act of 1936 established several types of loans, including one for building electric power lines and generating and transmitting electricity and another for farmers to buy electrical equipment.

Cass County Electric, formed in 1937, was North Dakota's second rural electric cooperative.

Minnkota formed

In 1940, Nodak Rural Electric Cooperative, made up of three eastern North Dakota cooperatives that merged, met with representatives of five northwestern Minnesota cooperatives to form Minnkota Power Cooperative, which is based in Grand Forks, N.D. The group hired Andrew Freeman, an Upham, N.D., native who'd managed one of the Nodak cooperatives, to run Minnkota. The new cooperative's aim was to provide its member systems with a reliable and stable-priced supply of electricity.

Minnkota, after failing to work out arrangements for electricity from Minneapolis-based Northern States Power and Otter Tail Power of Fergus Falls, Minn., obtained an $860,000 REA loan to build its own generation and transmission system. The system consisted of a diesel generating plant in Grand Forks, 120 miles of transmission line in Minnesota, 44 miles in North Dakota and some distribution substations.

The system performed well the fall of 1940, but that winter Mother Nature stepped in. The northern lights were very active one night and their magnetic influence caused all the meters in the power plant to give false readings.

Worried plant workers tried to call someone for advice only to have the telephone operator tell them the northern lights had knocked out long distance telephone service as well. Everything was back to normal the next morning.

The spring thaw uncovered another problem. A farmer called to report that power poles were leaning badly and transmission lines were dangerously close to the ground. An inspection revealed that the contractor who installed the lines used a mixture of dirt and snow to fill the holes around the poles and the snow melted, leaving the poles swaying in the wind.

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Highlights in Regional Energy Isues

1881: Fargo officials grant first gas and electric service franchises

1883: Colson Mine near Minot, N.D., becomes state’s first commercial coal venture

1895: Moorhead develops a municipal electrical power plant

1916: North Dakota’s first wildcat oil well drilled northeast of Williston near Ray

1935: Minnesota’s first rural electric cooperative incorporates

1937: First rural electric cooperative in North Dakota incorporates.

1951: Oil discovered in North Dakota

1966: Basin Electric’s Leland Olds lignite power plant near Stanton, N.D.

1970: Minnkota Power Cooperative’s Milton Y. Young lignite power plant near Center, N.D., begins operation.

1984: Great Plains Coal Gasification plant, now Great Plains Synfuels, starts producing natural gas.

Persistence paid off in oil hunt in N.D.

By Ellen Crawford
The Forum

Clarence Iverson wasn't surprised when oil came bubbling out of the ground in his wheat field south of Tioga, N.D., in April 1951.

A fortune teller he'd visited a few years earlier saw it in her crystal ball. Of course, he also had a little more concrete evidence. He'd periodically find a film of oil on the water in the cattle's watering tank. He filled the tank from the farm's water well.

The discovery of oil thrust Iverson firmly into the spotlight and oil industry history. His field was the site of the state's first commercial oil well. The Oklahoma-based Amerada Petroleum Co., which owned the well, named it the Clarence Iverson No. 1.

The oil strike ended years of speculation, hard work and broken dreams and changed North Dakota forever.

Efforts to find oil date back to 1916, when the Pioneer Oil and Gas Co. drilled the first wildcat well three miles southeast of Williston. Wildcat wells are drilled in areas not known to be productive. Pioneer quit when the well was 2,107 feet deep, not knowing oil was just 6,000 feet below.

In 1926, a group of Williston area businessmen formed the Big Viking Oil Co. One of the founders, Martin Jacobson, became enthused about drilling for oil after seeing a report made in 1917-18 on the U.S. geodetic survey. The company raised enough money by fall 1927 to hire a drilling rig.

It was forced to stop drilling the following spring. The well went down 3,300 feet without striking oil and it was out of money.

A few months later, armed with more financial backing, Big Viking drilled to 4,642 feet. But it still didn't find oil, and out of money again with no hope of raising more, it gave up.

Other attempts followed. Speculators poured hundreds of thousands of dollars - and in the case of Standard Oil Co. of California, more than 1 million - into the unsuccessful search for oil.

Even Amerada officials thought their well would be a flop. Just the day before it struck oil, a geologist on the company payroll said "it didn't look like we had anything but a headache in that hole."

Iverson didn't exactly get rich off the well. His royalties for its first year in operation were about $1,000, which prompted him to declare he wasn't going to give up farming, "even if they hit 20 wells on my land."

Boom and bust


North Dakota's first oil well begins producing April 4, 1951. Bill Shemorry / Special to The Forum

Oil scouts, geologists, promoters, drillers, lease buyers, brokers and laborers flooded western North Dakota as news of the 1951 strike spread. They and their families put a strain on community services, overcrowded schools, wore out roads and converted every unused granary, shed and garage into living space or offices.

Their presence also created an economic boom unlike anything the area had ever experienced. Dozens of businesses - everything from lunch counters to oil field equipment suppliers - sprang up to accommodate the new residents.

A story in The Forum described the scene this way: "Williston these days looks like it has a daily convention in town. Hotels are filled. Cafes are busy. Bank accounts are going up."

In 1953, Standard Oil of Indiana began building a $25 million oil refinery near Mandan and the Signal Oil and Gas Co. worked on a $17 million natural gas and sulfur plant at Tioga to handle the gas that came out of the oil wells.

By the end of 1960, the oil industry had spent an estimated $650 million in the 27th state to produce oil. As of April 1961, 2,806 wells had been drilled and 110 million barrels of oil extracted.

Despite this strong start, the state's oil industry spent the next nearly four decades on a roller coaster ride of ups and downs, subject to the whims of the economy and worldwide oil prices.

It's now going through one of its worst slumps. Oil prices dropped to their lowest levels in 12 years in the United States at the end of last year and nearly all of North Dakota's wells are shut down.

Another source tapped

North Dakotans have been using coal since the late 1800s, when they dug it out of pits or chipped it from seams along riverbanks.

The state's coal production was an estimated 100,000 tons by the turn of the century.

In the 1940s, North Dakota leaders began worrying about the state's lack of manufacturing, its dependence on wheat, population losses and relatively low income. Their solution: Attract new industries.

The North Dakota Research Foundation, a government agency established in 1943, worked to increase the use of lignite, the kind of coal found in the state, and other resources.

In 1951, the U.S. Bureau of Mines built the Charles R. Robertson Lignite Laboratory in Grand Forks on the University of North Dakota campus. By 1978 the laboratory, which changed its name to the Grand Forks Energy Technology Center, was one of the United States' leading coal researchers.

Lignite developed into a primary source of fuel for nearby electrical generating plants. It also became an answer to the nation's desire to break its dependence on foreign oil and avoid a worldwide energy crisis.

Construction began in 1981 on the Great Plains Coal Gasification plant near Beulah. The $2 billion plant, now known as Great Plains Synfuels, was the country's first commercial-sized facility to turn lignite into a synthetic natural gas.

North Dakota's lignite mines now produce almost 30 million tons of coal annually.

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