Electricity is so intertwined in modern lives that only in its absence do we truly appreciate its existence. Credited by many born before World War II as the most significant event in their lives, even today, many of these rural residents remember the moment and the place, the lights came on. But the story of rural electrification is about much more than lights blinking on across rural America. It's a story of dreams realized and an emergence of the cooperative as a business model that has stood the test of time. And it is not just a history, but also a present and a future.
As America emerged from the World War I and the Great Depression, Westinghouse's idea of alternating current central station power lit hundreds of towns and cities across the nation. But for America's six million rural farms, only 650,000 had alternating current electrical power. On May 11, 1935, at the urging of farmers groups across the country, President Franklin D. Roosevelt signed Executive Order 7037, creating the Rural Electrification Administration. The next year, bills were introduced in Congress to make REA a permanent agency. On May 21, 1936, the President signed the Rural Electrification Administration Act. Low-interest money was now available to bring electric service to rural
In 1939, a group of rural farmers and homeowners from Baldwin, Jones, and Putnam counties began the process of bringing electricity to rural middle Georgia. Tri-County Electric Membership Corporation was officially chartered on December 28, 1939. The members of the cooperatives first board of directors were W.H. Roberts, W.B. Williams, Mrs. George Stallings, J.P. Blasengame, M.E. Webb, Frank L. Denham, W.J. Beall, W.C. Evans, and T.W. Scott. |
