How Frenchtown Got Street Lights (in case you wondered)

STREET LAMPS – An anonymous columnist in the Frenchtown Star reminisced about what it was like before Frenchtown had street lights:

On dark rainy nights people with and without lanterns would grope their way through Egyptian darkness, now in the gutters, now against a partly opened gate that would strike you about where you had put your supper, bringing forth a grunt, breaking your watch chain, and perhaps the third commandment, by causing you to say things interspersed with adjectives neither refined nor elegant.

Frenchtown got its first street lamps in October of 1873. Two lamps were erected on opposite corners of Fifth and Harrison streets. It was a neighborhood effort, orchestrated by Levi Troxell, a house painter, who was soon to be mayor.

That same month, a street lamp was installed by Andrew Roberson in front of his store (which was in the pizzeria building that burned down in 2018), and another was installed by bank officials in front of the bank on Second Street (another building that burned down). This may have been in reaction to the nighttime September home invasion and attempted bank robbery there the previous month.

Before the end of January 1874, there were lamps in front of Ishmael Brink's hardware store at 24-26 Bridge Street, on Harrison Street at intersections with Second and Third streets, and in front of Joseph H. Reading's home on Everittstown Hill. But that one was short-lived. In February there was a mishap involving two mules and a sleigh full of firewood that sheared off the post at ground level.

In April, Borough Council agreed to pay for the lamp oil, and in December hired septuagenarian Dr. Isaac Ott to tend the lamps. Except for full-moon nights, he was paid 5 cents per lamp per night, lighting them at dusk and extinguishing them at 11 p.m. It that sounds overly generous, Borough Council would agree with you. In the spring of '75, that fee was cut half for the summer.

Ott was also in charge of caring for the poor, such care including temporary lodging in an old industrial building where Sunbeam Lenape Park is now.

This is the same Dr. Ott listed in the 1850 census as a physician residing in Nockamixon Township, Pa. He died in 1876.

In 1880 the borough hired Samuel S. Warrick at $10 a month to light and maintain the downtown street lamps. Citing the laxity of his predecessor (not Ott), the Star reported, “Sammy says he will have to wash the lamps twice before any light will show through.” But Warrick didn't last long; in 1882 J.C. Meyers was getting $13.50 a month in that role, which was expanding. Residents put up additional street lights on Harrison Street at Seventh and Eighth streets, which Borough Council accepted into the system.

The lamps were not electrified until the 1900s. But that's another bedtime story for another night. Are you asleep yet?

From “Rick's Frenchtown Encyclopedia”