Ear: Trullinger

Astoria got quite the Christmas present from John Course Trullinger on Christmas Eve, 1885. “Two weeks ago he said to us, ‘I will put a light in front of your building Christmas Eve,’ and he kept his word,” The Daily Morning Astorian reported on Christmas Day. It was the first electric light in the history of the city.

“The electric light streamed out from a glass globe strung on wires stretched from The Astorian building, making all other (oil) lights look dim, and attracting hundreds of spectators who, hurrying home with Christmas presents for wife and children, stopped to see the great luminous ball that shone like a sun lighting up the streets that it intersected.”

Nine years earlier, on Dec. 9, Trullinger lit the first oil street lamp in Astoria. The lamps “dimly dotted the streets … but it was a light, and beat no light all to pieces.” The paper reflected that “from coal oil to electricity is a long step … and our worthy mayor-elect deserves credit for his enterprise and go-ahead-ativeness.”

A second light was put up between Trullinger’s office and home, so bright it could be seen from Fort Stevens. Eight other lights were burning at his business, the West Shore Lumber Mill, and were expected to be spread about the city on Christmas Day.

Trullinger already had 32 subscribers for the new light system, and “the financial outlook for the new enterprise is as brilliant as the light itself,” the paper rightly decreed. In 1886, he started the Astoria Electric Light Co., which became Pacific Light and Power in 1910.

The entrepreneur died in 1901, and is buried in Ocean View Cemetery in Warrenton. (Photo: Early Electronics)