Imagine life in Rio Rico before there were any paved streets, homes, a market or gas stations, before electricity went to homes, or before there were private telephone lines.

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Margaret “Peggy” Cumming has lived her adult life on the Rocking H Ranch before there was any such place as Rio Rico. The ranch is two miles up Peck Canyon, west of Interstate 19 that now zips through the community that was founded in 1969.

Cumming, a nurse for the Nogales public schools from 1955 to 1968, commuted daily to work by crossing the Peck Canyon wash, but there was no bridge and she got soaked more than a few times.

Douglas Cumming, Peggy’s husband, built a four-room home for them on his parent’s ranch a few years after they married in 1946. To get to the Tucson-Nogales highway, the precursor to Interstate 19, Peggy crossed Peck Canyon on a dirt road about a quarter mile west of the present frontage road.

The summer monsoons brought a lot of water coursing down Peck Canyon to the Santa Cruz River. “It was just a dirt road, down the canyon, and when I had to go to work and there was a flood in the canyon my husband would put a rope on me and I’d cross the wash,” Peggy said.

“I had my car on the other side of the canyon, and just went to work. One time in the morning, I said, ‘If you don’t have a bridge across this when I come back, I’m quitting my job.’ And boy, he had it, or somewhat of a thing I could cross,” she said with a fond chuckle.

The electricity came not from a utility company, but from what Peggy, 86, called a light plant. Her son, Jim, said a Witte diesel engine powered the generator. “It was a one-cylinder and had two big wheels that would act as counterbalances. And whenever it stopped, to get it started somebody had to crank one of the flywheels,” Jim said.

Three families, Peggy and Douglas and their sons Jim and Tom, Douglas’ parents living in an adobe house they built in 1939, and the Kane family who lived farther west in the canyon, depended on the electricity from the light plant. It was noisy and ran non-stop. “People would say, ‘How can you stand that noise?’ We would say, ‘We can’t stand it when it stops,’” Peggy said.

They switched it off for the last time when electric poles to supply new homes in Rio Rico reached them in about 1979.

Peggy raised their sons while working at the Nogales schools as a nurse. Later, she worked as a school nurse at what was then Calabasas School and is now San Cayetano Elementary from 1969 to 1974. In the 1970s, the family branched out into offering popular horseback riding trips and cookouts at their Rocking H Stables, and Peggy was the cook.

The stable business made a big impression on Jim: “We had this huge clientele. I remember as a little kid you would have to take reservations and they would always get filled up. And they’d ask when the next ride was.” They could accommodate 27 people out on rides.

The cookouts could handle even more. “We had parties at which there were about 180, but not everybody rode, or they rode at different times on the same day. For the cookouts, we would take a pack horse, and mother would carefully package everything because it had to ride on a horse. You know, the beans couldn’t spill. The menu was hamburgers or steak. Beans, salsa, and probably the biggest thing was mother’s Dutch oven apple pie.”

Peggy pointed out: “That didn’t go on a horse.”

Tubac resident Loretta Lewis fondly remembers the delicious food. “She’d make those apple pies. I was fascinated with that. I had never seen those before,” said Lewis, whose son Michael went to high school with Jim and Tom.

Peggy said they also catered to children. “We had a business of picking up kids in Nogales. We picked them up, they’d come out and ride and we had a cookout and then we took them home. Their mothers never had to leave the house,” she said.

Peggy said she was a good horseback rider. “I loved horses and when I was a teenager I made friends with everybody that had ranches. That’s how I got involved with my husband, because he had a sister I met,” Peggy said.

At one time, the Rocking H Ranch spread over more than 10,000 acres and up to 450 head of cattle grazed on it north of Peck Canyon in the Tumacacori Mountain range. The majority of the land was leased on a permit from the U.S. Forest Service.

Peggy has remained involved in Nogales activities. “My grandfather was one of the founders” of St. Andrew’s Episcopal Church. “I was baptized there, confirmed there and married there.” Peggy helped find a home at the church for the St. Andrew’s Crippled Children’s Clinic and still assists by sending food in for the monthly programs that provide free medical care for children from Mexico. “I always bake cakes and yesterday I supplied half the hot dogs for the kids.”

She was also one of the organizing members of SEABHS, Southeastern Arizona Behavioral Health Services. She’s been a member of the Santa Cruz County Cowbelles for decades, and was president in 1985-86. While her sons were in school, Peggy was an active 4-H leader.

She often runs into people who were students when she was their school nurse. “All the kids remember me, but it’s hard for me to remember them,” she said.

It’s been a good life. Her son Tom, and his wife Rose, live nearby and her son Jim lives with her. She has five grandchildren. “I always wanted to be involved with horses, and I liked the ranch life, I really enjoyed it,” she said. “And of course, Douglas made it interesting, too.

“Southern Arizona and Nogales are just a part of me. I wouldn’t know how to live any place else.”

(Reach the writer at kathleenvan@msn.com.