Rural life before electricity

In the 1930s, the majority of Texas’ rural inhabitants still lived in conditions more like the state’s first settlers than citizens of the 20th Century. Fifty years after Thomas Edison invented the incandescent bulb, most farm and ranch families still cooked on wood-burning stoves, hauled well water to their houses by bucket, scrubbed laundry on washboards and read by kerosene lamp.
"Living was just drudgery then." said one woman. "No lights, no radio, no plumbing.… That was farm life for us."

The reign of private power

Texas’ cities and towns had long been lit by electricity, but the countryside was still steeped in darkness. Only one farm in ten had electric power.
The reason? Private utilities refused to extend electricity to rural areas.
Delegations of ranchers and farmers regularly visited the wood-paneled offices of utility executives to plead for electric service: to run farm equipment, to unburden their wives from the drudgery of washing in kettles and cooking on wood stoves, to provide light for their children’s schoolwork.
The utility companies’ response was brutally blunt: rural electrification was unprofitable. Rural areas were too thinly populated to justify the investment of power lines.

A new day

The dominance of private power came to an end on May 11, 1935 when Franklin Roosevelt signed the Rural Electrification Act. Congress appropriated one hundred million dollars for the Rural Electrification Administration to provide low-interest loans to local electric cooperatives to build distribution lines.
Only a handful of such co-ops then existed, but that would soon change. The state’s farm and ranch families seized the opportunity to build for themselves what private utilities would not. Meetings were held in churches and schools; articles of incorporation were drawn up; boards of directors elected. Across Texas, from the Panhandle to the Rio Grande, dozens of electric cooperatives sprang into being.

Gathering the names

To be eligible for an REA loan, each co-op had to have at least a hundred members. To accomplish this, volunteers began gathering names, driving and walking on dirt roads sometimes little better than muddy mule paths. They went from farmhouse to cabin to shanty, wherever families lived and worked with no better light than an oil lamp.
Often the volunteers found people made suspicious by poverty and broken promises. The offer of electricity for a signature and a $5.00 deposit sounded more like a swindle than an opportunity. Besides, who had $5.00 to spare?

Building the lines

Despite these obstacles, the volunteers eventually gathered enough names to qualify their co-ops for REA loans. Then began the work of building power lines.
Crews of local men and boys, often from families who had to pay for their co-op memberships with labor, would pile onto flatbed trucks and ride to the work sites. Under the sweltering Texas sun they hacked brush and axed trees, pounded holes into bedrock, set 25 to 30 foot poles of East Texas pine into the holes and strung them with wire.
It was back-breaking labor, but the workers were sweating for more than their forty cent hourly wage; they were driven by an ideal. Sometimes, after weeks of work, a crew would reach a farm at mid-day. They would dig the last hole, erect the last pole, string the last line to the house and barn and sit down—the whole crew—to a hot lunch fixed by the workers’ wives and daughters and sisters, served on the family’s "Sunday china."
Those moments were more than meals; they were celebrations of the triumph of ordinary people who had forged their own destiny.

The lights come on

Even after the lines were built, co-op members sometimes had to wait as long as a year for electric service. Many began to doubt the hope of rural electrification would ever be fulfilled.
But the co-ops delivered their promise. In farm and ranch houses across the state, the same scene was repeated again and again as families gazed in wonder and delight at electric bulbs flickering with light. For rural Texans, the long dark was over. The 20th Century had finally arrived.

Co-ops today

Today, more than sixty years after they were first created, electric cooperatives still serve rural Texas families. Seventy distribution co-ops and eleven generation and transmission co-ops provide power to nearly three million members across the state.

Texas electric co-ops have made it possible for farm and ranch families, no matter how remote, to enjoy the same comforts and amenities as urban dwellers. For rural Texans, co-op power means more than lights and television and farm machinery and household appliances. It means freedom from drudgery, independence from the dictates of corporate boardrooms, and the power to decide their own path to the future.

For Texans, co-op power means many things, but foremost it means freedom.
It always will.