It was dark. The only light flickered through the globes of coal oil lamps. Cooking was done on the wood stove. Washing was done by hand and scrub board.
This was living in the country 75 years ago.
And living wasn’t easy for rural families. The conveniences of city life — the conveniences made possible with electricity — were not available to most country folks.
Power companies didn’t want to string their lines into less-populated rural areas. It would cost too much. Besides, they thought, farmers didn’t need electricity.
But farmers knew differently. They knew how an electric line could make them more productive. Farm wives, meanwhile, would no longer need to slave over a steamy hot woodstove in the summer and press line-dried clothes with a 6-pound stove-heated “sad iron.”
Electricity could change things for them: change things for the better.
Roosevelt creates REAPresident Franklin Roosevelt knew about the hardships of rural America. Only one farmer in 10 had electricity. He vowed to do something about that. And, when he issued Executive Order 7037, which created the Rural Electrification Administration on May 11, 1935, the countryside finally had the promise for a better future.
The REA, Roosevelt explained, had a simple purpose: “to initiate, formulate, administer and supervise a program of approved projects with respect to the generation, transmission and distribution of electric energy to rural areas.”
It was the lifeblood for rural electric cooperatives, which farmers formed to bring power to the countryside. The order meant Congress could spend $1 million on rural electrification projects. It became the best investment the government ever made for rural America.
Though REA was initially part of an unemployment relief plan, it became an independent lending agency with the passage of the Rural Electrification Act a year later. Roosevelt signed the act, authored by Sen. George Norris and Rep. Sam Rayburn, on May 20, 1936.
Rural electric cooperatives started in Indiana with the help of the Indiana Farm Bureau Cooperative and its general manager, I. Harvey Hull. Hull, who learned of the effectiveness of electric co-ops during a trip to the Scandinavian countries in 1934, spearheaded the effort to bring electricity to rural Indiana.
Hull helped author the Indiana REMC Act, which was passed by the Indiana General Assembly and signed into law by Gov. Paul V. McNutt two months before Roosevelt signed Executive Order 7037.
Co-op interest flourished in the state soon after the REMC Act was passed.
Members signed upMen and women from throughout the state volunteered their time and powers of persuasion to sign their neighbors up for electricity. All it took was $5, and you were a member of a rural electric cooperative.
Getting that $5 was not always easy, though. After all, this was the height of the Depression, and money was tight. Besides, many people were distrustful of this whole co-op idea. What if it failed?
Though it took some prodding and patience to get people signed up, with each new person, the building of lines moved closer to reality. Just as the farmers themselves did the signing up, so did they set their own poles — by hand. They volunteered long hours with the help of engineering crews sent out by Indiana Statewide REMC, a service organization set up by the Farm Bureau in 1935.
Through the 1930s and 1940s, lines were strung throughout rural Indiana and the nation. As homes were gradually energized and the countryside was aglow — not with the flicker from a coal oil lamp anymore but the constant light of a bare bulb — the power of people, joining together for a cause, was lauded just as much as the power of electricity.
For those early electric cooperative members, the day their lights came on was one of those watershed events that, years later, inspired fond memories. Clark and Lois Woody, whose rural Boone County farm was one of the first in the country to be electrified through REA-financed lines, received their electric meter on May 22, 1936.
“There were men everywhere — in all the rooms and closets, turning on all the lights and switches to make sure they worked; they weren’t sure it would work,” Lois Woody once said about her family’s first day in their newly electrified home.
Others remembered their awe when seeing a 25-watt bulb aglow for the first time, and their shock since the illumination unmasked dusty corners in homes once thought to be spotless.
After rural electrification, people bought appliances they’d only dreamed about: refrigerators, toasters, radios and washing machines topped the list.
Still, most new electric consumers realized they were in the dark when it came to knowing anything about the new power. A common perception was that there was a limit as to how much electricity each consumer could use. Back in the 1980s, Edward Purtzer, former manager of Southern Indiana REC (now Southern Indiana Power) in Tell City, recalled, “We had a lady … that always used 35 kilowatts (a month). I learned she went up to 35, then turned everything off. She thought that was all she could use.”
People like her would sometimes take their ironing to church since electrical use there was so low. They’d pull out their kerosene lamps whenever they thought they were using too much power.
But through a traveling appliance show called “The REA Circus” and electric cooperative annual meeting caravans, co-op members in rural electrification’s early days were invited to gather under the big top in a county fair atmosphere to learn about electric appliances and farm equipment, and energy use. As many as 5,000 a day would venture to the circus to see not tigers and elephants, but newfangled electric timesavers.
For those in the country, throughout the country, finally getting electricity was a turning point to a bright future. John Snyder, a rural electric pioneer from Henry County REMC, New Castle, once said, “It was like a new world. Just like opening up a door into something you never expected to have.”
Seventy-five years later, we celebrate that new world and the pioneers who paved the way for the generations since. —
Emily Schilling, editor of Electric Consumer