Rural Electrification: Bringing Light to Pennsylvania Farms

In nineteen thirty-six, three out of every four Pennsylvania farms had no electric service. Kerosene lamps, hand pumps, and wood stoves were still everyday realities for farm families across Bedford, Fulton, Huntingdon, and dozens of other rural counties. The New Deal's Rural Electrification Administration, created by executive order in nineteen thirty-five and written into law by Congress in nineteen thirty-six, set out to change that by backing farmer-owned cooperatives rather than waiting for private utilities to find rural areas profitable.

Over the five years following nineteen thirty-six, fourteen consumer-owned electric cooperatives formed across Pennsylvania to serve the farms private companies had ignored. One of them, New Enterprise Rural Electric Cooperative, was incorporated on November eighteenth, nineteen thirty-eight, to serve this corner of south-central Pennsylvania. It was a community-built institution, funded by its own members and structured to serve them rather than shareholders. The lights that came on in farmhouses across these hills represented one of the New Deal's most concrete and lasting achievements.