This community is about ten miles south of Boston. Photograph taken looking southwest at the intersection of Franklin Street (SR 37) and Union Street (SR 139). The electric distribution at the time was owned by the Weymouth Light and Power Company (later Massachusetts Electric around 1960). The overhead primary as seen was converted to 13.8 kv in the late 1950s to accomodate the needs of this fast growing Boston suburb. In the early 1950s the upright pole-mounted incandescent street lights were changed to GE mercury vapor ones enclosed within their Form 109 luminaires, mounted on curved six-foot crossarms with their "can" ballasts mounted on the pole (physically similar to the one you see here for the older incandescent light on the uppermost crossarm). A 3000-watt Fisher Pierce tube-powered photocontrol operated several 400-watt mercury vapor lights with the switched load side serving these lights identified by a blue porcelain insulator on each crossarm.

The latter colored porcelain insulators supported what was known as a "pilot wire". In essence it was the 120 volt load energizing (nighttime) side of the master photocontrol operating strings of street lights of the same voltage. This technology was introduced in the later 1940s and eventually began to supercede the electrically-series method of street lighting which went back to the arc light days of the 1880s. By the late 1950s individual photoelectric lighting controls built as part of street light fixtures became more affordable and the norm as they are today.