Al Greene, now in his 80s, remembers when the lights went on in the rural counties of northeastern Colorado. He was a young electrician/line man when he helped hook up farms and ranches to the rural electric network.
“They sure were happy when you turned on the lights,” he said. “If you worked on the electricity, they fed you dinner and those farm cooks could cook!”
The deliverer of the long-awaited electricity was “The REA.”
The deliverer of long-awaited electricity to rural households, towns, farms and ranches was the “The REA," a 1930s pamphlet promoting the Rural Electric Authorities.
Electricity came to most rural America a quarter century later than it did to most U.S. cities and towns. Until then, agricultural residences got by using 32-watt batteries that generated electricity from windmills for critical appliances like refrigerators. Nearly 90 percent of urban dwellers had electricity by the early 1930s, but only 10 percent of rural folks did. Farmers milked their cows by hand in the dim light of a kerosene lantern. Farmwives slaved over the wood range and washboard.
America lagged far behind Europe in providing electricity to rural areas because U.S. power companies were unwilling to serve farmsteads, refusing to extend their lines to less-than-profitable rural areas. The power companies also balked at government involvement. By 1934, less than 11 percent of U.S. farms had electricity, compared to Germany and France that same year, where nearly 90 percent of farms had electricity.
Elected in 1932, President Franklin Delano Roosevelt recognized the hardship of rural areas, where commercial companies wanted to charge fees four times the cost of urban electricity. He experienced it himself, paying exorbitant costs for electricity at his country cottage at Warm Springs, Ga.
FDR also recognized an opportunity to create new jobs and stimulate manufacturing in the midst of the Great Depression. On May 11, 1935, he signed an executive order establishing the Rural Electrification Administration. The REA became a key program in Roosevelt’s “New Deal,” providing loans and other assistance so that rural cooperatives — basically, groups of farmers — could build and run their own electrical distribution systems.
The Rural Electrification Act established the lending program that helped fund installation of the power utility lines. Roosevelt appointed Morris Llewellyn Cooke as the REA’s first administrator. A mechanical engineer, Cooke had devised efficient rural distribution systems for New York and Pennsylvania power companies. Cooke prepared a detailed plan to efficiently electrify the nation’s vast rural regions, applying systems engineering — called “scientific management” in those days.
The hero was a quasi-governmental entity, called a Rural Electrification Authority, which operated using low-cost federal loans and relying up local labor. These REA co-operatives acquire land for right of way and employed men to erect poles and string electric utility wire across prairies and plains, up winding canyons and over mountain ridges. In some areas, the roads were so bad that they had to use mules to haul in the utility poles.
The co-operative REA's distributed power generated by coal, and waterpower and other sources to member-users. Photos courtesy of Central Valley Rural Electric Association
REA “field” men met with farm folks day and night, outlining to rural leaders the procedures and principles that would create and install the power network. Local organizers went up and down country roads, farm to farm, getting signatures from new REA members and collecting the $5 connection fee, an amount that was hard to come by during the dim, dark years of the Depression.
It was said that women and their egg money helped electrify Colorado. Many a farmwife came forward with $5 and said, “Here’s my egg money, make sure I’m on the list.” Perhaps this was because women were more needful of electricity than their menfolk who had diesel powered generators in the barn.
In Washington, D.C., meanwhile, engineers and specialists worked at a frantic pace to keep up with the volume of applications for establishing REAs. It seemed that everyone wanted to “get the REA.”
Country folks waited, excitedly. Poles began to dot the landscape and crews began stringing line. Then electricians like Al Greene connected the power line to the farmhouse and to the barn. When light and power came, farm families rejoiced at finally having the electrical appliances most other Americans had taken for granted for years – washing machines, electric ranges, refrigerators, toasters, etc.
What a happy day for housewives when the wringer washing machine was unloaded onto the front porch. Children raced from room to room, delightedly turning the light switches on and off, on and off, on and off. In the barn and in the farmyard, men used electric machinery to grind animal feed, shell corn, trim sheep, pump water and saw wood. Milking machines and electric hay-lifting hoists eased farmers’ and ranchers’ work burdens. In the country towns, Main Street gained an electric co-op storefront and the REA organizations became a social focal point for many communities.
Rural electrification became one of the most successful government programs ever enacted. Within two years – by 1937 – there were 350 rural cooperatives bringing electricity to nearly 1.5 million farm acres in 45 states. By 1939, the REA had helped establish 417 rural electric cooperatives serving 288,000 households. A typical system had 250 miles of line installed with $230,000 borrowed from the federal government, providing electricity to 800 member-consumers.
Rural households with electricity rose to 25 percent by 1939. The cost per mile of rural power line had dropped from $2,000 to $600. Almost half of all farms were wired by 1942, and virtually all of them by the 1950s.
Then, as now, getting electric power from its generation point to households and businesses, farms and ranches utilized the power grid. Power plants equipped with generators converted a source of energy – typically coal or falling water, and today also wind, sun or a nuclear reactor – into electricity. This electrical power is then transmitted through the distribution system to individual buildings.
Most rural electrification today is the product of locally owned rural electric cooperatives that got their start by borrowing funds from the REA to build lines and provide service on a nonprofit basis. The REA was abolished in 1994 by a massive reorganization of the Department of Agriculture. Its responsibilities were transferred to a new agency, the Rural Utilities Service.
Today, there are 900 member-owned electric distribution cooperatives in the United States that provide power to outlying areas. Colorado has 22 REAs. The first Colorado REA to celebrate its 75th anniversary, the Grand Valley Rural Power Lines, established in 1935 serves more than 16,000 member-owners in the area outside Grand Junction. Colorado’s largest REA is Intermountain Rural Electric Association with nearly 137,000 members and serving a 5,000-square-mile territory encompassing or entering into 10 Front Range counties and serving rural residents and dozens of smaller towns east, west and south of the metro Denver area and west of Colorado Springs – including this author’s hometown of Palmer Lake. The IREA headquarters is located in Sedalia, between Littleton and Castle Rock, with district offices in Strasburg, Conifer and Woodland Park.
