The teens and 20s

The teens and the 1920s marked rapid expansion for Otter Tail Power Company.  In 1909 the company served two towns, Fergus Falls, Minnesota, and Wahpeton, North Dakota. In 1929, 20 years later, the company was serving 314 towns and 534 farms.

By the early 1920s almost every town of any size had electric service. A small generator driven by a gas or diesel engine supplied the electricity. Larger towns used one or more steam engines. The city usually owned the distribution system, but in some cases private parties owned it.

The electricity produced by those small, inefficient generators was expensive.  In some towns rates were as high as 30 cents a kilowatt-hour. Otter Tail Power Company's rate of 16 cents a kilowatt-hour, by comparison, was very attractive.  Some towns sent delegations to Fergus Falls to meet with Vernon Wright or C. S. Kennedy and ask them to serve their towns.

Otter Tail Power Company was not without competition. Other small power companies were looking for customers. None of them had enough financial backing to survive and Otter Tail Power Company eventually bought them out.

Most of the new towns that the company acquired initially were served as wholesale customers but they were gradually converted to retail towns. That was more profitable for the company. When a town went from wholesale to retail the distribution system had to be rebuilt. It was almost always in poor condition or it had been poorly constructed originally.

As Otter Tail Power Company expanded it saw the need to build transmission lines to connect those new towns to the system. In the 1920s the company had several large construction crews in the field every year building transmission lines from early spring to late fall.

In the early years of the company's history, and through most of the 1920s, few independent electrical contractors were available. If homeowners wanted to wire their houses for electric service, they had to do it themselves or find a handyman.  As might be expected some of the workmanship was poor or even unsafe. To fill that need the company sent out wiring crews to wire homes and commercial buildings at the owner's expense.

During that same period very few appliance dealers existed. To help build load Otter Tail Power Company formed its own appliance stores in many of the larger towns. That continued until 1939 when the company got out of the appliance business.

Written by Myron Broschat, Otter Tail Power Company retiree
Sources: The Power People by Ralph Johnson and Otter Tail Power Company by Thomas Wright