Orcasional Musings | Water? Electricity? Oh, and gold!

||| ORCASIONAL MUSINGS BY STEVE HENIGSON |||

In 1946, my family moved from the rural south shore of Long Island into hyper-urban New York City. One of the things that sticks most strongly in my mind from that move is that we had to buy new clocks! While the rural south shore of Long Island was served by modern alternating-current (AC) electricity, much of New York City was still operating on old-fashion direct current (DC).

Back then, the city took  some of its municipal electricity from the power stations that ran its subway, which still runs on DC today. Since AC clocks won’t run on DC, we needed new ones. And then, just a year or two later, the whole city switched to AC, and we had to buy new clocks all over again.

By 1905, when Robert Moran had begun to build Rosario, his retirement home on Orcas Island, he had already bought up just about all of the watershed property on the eastern side of the island. He wanted the water to drink, of course, but he also wanted it as a source of electricity. Properly managed, large quantities of water, all running sharply downhill, easily produces lots of electricity at very little cost.

In 1905, there were two competing electricity-generating philosophies. Thomas Edison was the champion of direct-current generation, which had already been in existence for more than a century. Nikola Tesla invented alternating-current generation in 1888, and licensed it to Westinghouse. While DC is easy to understand intuitively, AC is arcane and complicated. But DC has severe practical limitations which AC overcomes.

Moran chose DC power for Rosario, probably because it was easy to understand and to maintain, but possibly also because he was a shipbuilder, and the ships of the time used it. Therefore it was what he best understood. If you look, you can still follow the path of the water that was taken from the flanks of Mount Constitution, down to Rosario to generate Moran’s DC electricity.

In Cascade Creek, near the Cascade Falls parking lot, you can see a small portion of Moran’s ductwork. Further on, at the westernmost point of Cascade Lake, is the concrete dam that Moran built. It deepened the lake, and thereby increased the volume and power of the flowing water that he needed. More ductwork leads from the dam down toward Rosario. And on the Rosario property, just past the lagoon and its bridge, and tucked into the hillside diagonally across the road from the derelict machine shop, you will find the original power house.

Here the swiftly moving water, descending toward the East Sound, ran a large DC generator. Direct-current electricity travelled from the power house to the Rosario mansion on thick overhead wires. A stub of those transmission lines still exists, although it isn’t operational, and it doesn’t go very far. The electricity went no further than the mansion. Moran may have been a generous man, but he didn’t think it necessary to give electricity to the entire island.

By the way, although The Great Orcas Island Gold Rush was a complete fabrication and meant as a joke, there really is an Orcasian gold mine, up on the flanks of Mount Constitution, in Moran State Park! When Mr. Moran gave the park to the state, he retained a small portion of it for himself. That small portion contains a productive, hard-rock gold mine, although there is no public record of whether or not it is still in use. And there aren’t any Leprechauns up there, either.