Farmers Electric Cooperative
Greenville, Hunt County, Texas
Marker Inscription
In 1936, President Franklin Roosevelt created the Rural Electrification Administration (REA) to fund the expansion of electricity to rural America. With federal funding, small electric cooperatives began to appear in the area, eventually merging into a larger tri-county cooperative called Farmers Electric. The first 50 miles of lines were energized on September 14, 1938, supplying power to 101 customers. After one year, more than 800 customers had power which allowed for a simplified and safer home. Despite the difficult financial time during the depression, the need and desire for electricity meant a growing membership for the cooperative. This not only included electricity, but also a community of neighbors and friends.
Erected by Texas Historical Commission
The Story
When President Franklin Roosevelt created the Rural Electrification Administration in 1936, federal funding let small cooperatives spring up to bring power to the countryside, eventually merging into Farmers Electric. Its first 50 miles of line went live on September 14, 1938, serving 101 customers; within a year more than 800 households had electricity. Even in the depths of the Depression, the hunger for power made the cooperative grow.
Why it matters
Rural electrification transformed daily life across America, and cooperatives like this one show how New Deal policy and neighborly organization together lit up the farms that private utilities had passed by.
The story behind this marker
AI contextThe era
In the depths of the Great Depression, much of rural America still went dark at sundown. Cities had been wired for decades, but private power companies saw little profit in stringing miles of line to reach scattered farmhouses. As a result, families in the countryside pumped water by hand, cooked and ironed with fire, and read by lamplight, while their cousins in town flipped a switch.
That gap was the target of one of the New Deal's most transformative programs. In 1936 President Franklin Roosevelt created the Rural Electrification Administration to fund the spread of electricity into exactly the places the utilities had skipped. Rather than building the lines itself, the REA offered low-cost federal loans to locally organized cooperatives — neighbors banding together to bring power to their own communities.
Around Greenville, that federal money let small electric cooperatives spring up and eventually merge into a larger tri-county organization: Farmers Electric. It was a hopeful undertaking in a hard time, launched while money was scarce and the future uncertain.
People & events
The pivotal date on this marker is September 14, 1938 — the day the cooperative energized its first fifty miles of line and delivered power to 101 customers. It's worth pausing on how modest that beginning was, and how enormous its effect. For those first 101 households, an ordinary evening changed forever.
The marker gently sketches what electricity meant in practical terms: a home made "simplified and safer." Behind those words lie real transformations — an electric pump instead of a hand pump, a light bulb instead of an open flame, refrigeration instead of a spring house. The dangers of kerosene lamps and wood stoves gave way to the steadiness of a wire in the wall.
Word traveled fast. Within a single year the cooperative had grown from 101 customers to more than 800. Even amid the financial strain of the Depression, the desire for power outran every hardship. And because this was a cooperative, its growth built more than a utility. As the marker puts it, membership brought "not only electricity, but also a community of neighbors and friends" — farmers who together owned the very lines that lit their homes.
Its place in the American story
The story of Farmers Electric is the story of how the United States finally became a fully modern nation, farmyard by farmyard. When the REA began, only a small fraction of American farms had central-station electricity; within little more than a decade, the great majority did. Few government programs have so directly changed the texture of everyday life.
What makes the rural electrification story distinctly American is the shape it took. Rather than a top-down utility imposed from Washington, it worked through thousands of member-owned cooperatives — Farmers Electric among them — that put the decisions and the ownership in local hands. It was federal policy and neighborly self-organization working as one, and the combination proved durable. Many of those cooperatives still deliver power today.
This single Greenville-area co-op, lighting 101 homes on a September day in 1938 and 800 within the year, is a local window onto a national transformation. It captures the moment the countryside stopped being a place the modern age had passed by.
If you visit
There's no gusher or grand building here — the monument is the ordinary miracle of the light switch, which makes this a marker that rewards a little imagination. Read the dates and the numbers, then look at the ordinary homes and farms around you and picture them before 1938, lit only by lamps after dark.
The best way to feel this site is to think about what changed for a single family: the first cold refrigerator, the first evening a child could read past sunset without straining, the first pump that didn't require an aching arm. That's the human weight behind the phrase "simplified and safer."
If you're mapping a road trip through Hunt County, this stop pairs well with the region's other markers about community-building and everyday life — it's a New Deal story told at the scale of a front porch. As you drive the surrounding roads, notice the power lines overhead and remember that neighbors, pooling federal loans and their own labor, once put the first of them up themselves.
Written by AI to add context, grounded in the marker’s inscription and the historical record. The inscription above is the original, unaltered text.
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Related people
- · Franklin D. Roosevelt
Related events
- · Rural Electrification Administration
Themes & tags
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