Aurora's Light Towers

In the spring of 1881 Aurora contracted for sixteen arc lamps of two thousand candlepower at six thousand dollars a year for five years, and on the evening of 8 November the system was switched on. The lamps went up on seven towers of about a hundred and fifty feet, some free standing and some set on top of a tall building or a school bell tower, with two or three lamps apiece: four on the east side of the Fox River, two on the west, and one in the downtown centre on Stolp Island. The promoter was Alderman L. O. Hill, who owned a sash factory, took a franchise from Charles Brush's Brush Electric Company of Cleveland and formed the Aurora Electric Light and Power Company to supply the city, power plant included. Tower lighting was a short lived idea. Instead of lamping each street it hung a few very bright lamps high enough to wash a whole district in a hard white light that was commonly likened to moonlight and that left one side of every street in intense shadow. Aurora boasted it was the first city in the entire west to adopt the electric light, though Wabash, Indiana had lit its streets from the county courthouse dome in March 1880. When the contract ran out in 1886 the city built a plant of its own off the pumping station and lowered the lamps to fifteen or twenty feet above the street crossings, which worked better. The towers came down in January 1902. What stuck was the name, taken up in 1908 when River Street merchants relit the downtown, and Aurora is the City of Lights still.