Lyndon B. Johnson and Hill Country Electrification
Johnson City, Blanco County, Texas
Marker Inscription
LYNDON B. JOHNSON AND HILL COUNTRY ELECTRIFICATION BY THE 1930s, MANY RESIDENTS OF CITIES ACROSS THE U.S. WERE BENEFITING FROM THE COMMON USE OF ELECTRICITY. HOWEVER, A VAST MAJORITY OF RURAL AREAS LACKED ELECTRIC SERVICE, WHICH COMPOUNDED DEPRESSION-ERA PROBLEMS FOR FARMERS WHOSE CROP RETURNS WERE ALREADY MEAGER. IN 1935, PRESIDENT FRANKLIN D. ROOSEVELT ESTABLISHED THE RURAL ELECTRIFICATION ADMINISTRATION (REA) TO MAKE LOANS TO COOPERATIVES ESTABLISHED BY THE FARMERS THEMSELVES. ALTHOUGH THE REA QUICKLY HELPED BRING ELECTRICITY TO RURAL AMERICA, ITS PROGRAM DID NOT EXTEND TO THE TEXAS HILL COUNTRY, WHOSE SPARSE POPULATION DID NOT MEET QUALIFICATIONS. IN 1937, FUTURE PRESIDENT LYNDON B. JOHNSON WORKED TO BRING ELECTRICITY TO THE AREA, A PROMISE HE MADE DURING HIS SUCCESSFUL RUN FOR THE U.S. CONGRESS THAT YEAR. HIS PLAN FOCUSED ON TWO LOWER COLORADO RIVER DAMS: BUCHANAN IN BURNET COUNTY AND MARSHALL FORD (NOW MANSFIELD) IN TRAVIS COUNTY. JOHNSON’S APPEALS TO ROOSEVELT AND GOVERNMENT AGENCIES LED TO AN EASING OF THE REA’S REQUIREMENTS. RANCHER E. BABE SMITH JOINED JOHNSON IN CANVASSING HIS DISTRICT TO CONVINCE FARMERS TO PAY $5 DEPOSITS, WHICH WOULD ALLOW THE PEDERNALES ELECTRIC COOPERATIVE (PEC) TO BUILD INFRASTRUCTURE AND SELL POWER. IN 1938, WITH ABOUT 3,300 FAMILIES SIGNED FOR ELECTRIC SERVICE, THE REA AWARDED THE PEC A LOAN TO BUILD OVER 1,700 MILES OF ELECTRIC LINES, THE LARGEST ALLOTMENT EVER MADE BY THE ADMINISTRATION. IN THE FALL OF 1939, ELECTRICITY BEGAN TO FLOW. THE PEC BECAME THE NATION’S LARGEST ELECTRIC COOPERATIVE AND REMAINS AMONG THE DOZENS OF OTHER SUCH COOPERATIVES ACROSS TEXAS. LYNDON JOHNSON’S WORK WAS ESSENTIAL IN THEIR FORMATION AND THE EXPANSION OF ELECTRIFICATION IN THE TEXAS HILL COUNTRY. 175 YEARS OF TEXAS INDEPENDENCE * 1836-2011
Erected by Texas Historical Commission
The Story
By the 1930s cities across America enjoyed electricity while most of the rural Texas Hill Country remained in the dark, its sparse population failing to qualify for New Deal aid. In 1937 newly elected congressman Lyndon B. Johnson pressed President Roosevelt and federal agencies to bend the Rural Electrification Administration's rules, focusing on power from the Buchanan and Marshall Ford dams. With rancher E. Babe Smith helping sign up families, the Pedernales Electric Cooperative won the largest REA loan ever made, and in the fall of 1939 the lights came on.
Why it matters
Bringing power to the Hill Country was one of the young Johnson's defining achievements and a landmark example of how New Deal rural electrification transformed everyday American life.
The story behind this marker
AI contextThe era
In the 1930s, America was living through two revolutions at once—one economic and one technological—and the Texas Hill Country was on the losing side of both. The Great Depression had gutted farm prices, so families who worked this rocky, drought-prone land were already squeezed. And while cities across the nation had come alive with electric light, refrigeration, and labor-saving machines, the countryside remained dark after sundown.
Rural electrification was not a small gap; it was a chasm in the American standard of living. Without power, farm families hauled water by hand, washed clothes on a board, ironed with wedges of hot metal, and did the evening's work by the smoke and dim glow of kerosene lamps. Women's labor in particular was brutal and unending. The technology to change all of this existed—it simply stopped at the edge of town.
Into that gap stepped the New Deal. In 1935, President Franklin D. Roosevelt created the Rural Electrification Administration to lend money to cooperatives that farmers themselves would form and own. It was a powerful idea—but the Hill Country's population was so thin and scattered that it failed to meet the REA's own requirements. The very emptiness that made the region so poor also made it, on paper, ineligible for the program built to help it.
People & events
The man who refused to accept that verdict was a young, relentless newcomer to Congress. Running for a U.S. House seat in 1937, Lyndon B. Johnson had promised the farmers of his district electricity—and once elected, he set about making the federal government keep his promise. His plan leaned on power generated by two dams on the lower Colorado River: Buchanan in Burnet County and Marshall Ford (today's Mansfield Dam) in Travis County.
Johnson's method was equal parts persistence and access. He pressed his appeals directly to President Roosevelt and to the agencies, arguing that the Hill Country's sparse population was exactly why it needed help, not a reason to deny it. His lobbying paid off in a loosening of the REA's density requirements—the bureaucratic breakthrough that made everything else possible.
But Washington was only half the battle; the other half was fought farm to farm. Rancher E. Babe Smith joined Johnson in canvassing the district, persuading skeptical, cash-poor families to put down $5 deposits so the Pedernales Electric Cooperative could build lines and sell power. By 1938, some 3,300 families had signed on, and the REA awarded the PEC the largest loan it had ever made—enough to string more than 1,700 miles of line. In the fall of 1939, the current finally flowed, and the lamps of the Hill Country came on.
Its place in the American story
This is one of the clearest windows anywhere into how the New Deal reached into ordinary American life. Rural electrification took a technology that cities had enjoyed for decades and finally carried it down the farm lane—transforming not just chores but health, safety, and the sheer number of hours in a usable day. Multiply this cooperative across the country and you have one of the largest quality-of-life upgrades in the nation's history.
The Pedernales Electric Cooperative grew into the largest such cooperative in the nation and stands among the dozens that still deliver power across rural Texas. That cooperative model—neighbors pooling federal credit to own their own utility—remains a distinctive and enduring piece of the American landscape.
And it is a formative chapter in a presidential story. The drive, the deal-making, and the conviction that government could and should improve poor people's lives would echo through Johnson's later career. To understand where his faith in federal action was forged, you can look right here, to the fight to light the Hill Country.
If you visit
This is Lyndon Johnson's home country, and the land itself tells the story. Look out over the ranches and hills and picture them at night in the 1930s—no glow on the horizon, just kerosene lamps in scattered windows—and you begin to feel what a single flick of a switch meant to the families who lived here.
As you travel the region, watch for the power lines threading across the countryside. They are so ordinary that they vanish from notice, which is exactly the point: this was among the first stretched here, the visible result of a young congressman's promise and thousands of $5 deposits from families betting on a brighter future.
The marker sits in Johnson City, in the heart of the country this effort transformed, and it pairs naturally with a broader Hill Country drive through the landscape that shaped a president. Read it as the story of a moment when the modern world finally arrived—not with fanfare, but with the simple, world-changing hum of electricity in the wires overhead.
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
- · Lyndon B. Johnson
- · Franklin D. Roosevelt
- · E. Babe Smith
Themes & tags
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