Rural Electrification
Standing Stone Township, Bradford County, Pennsylvania
Marker Inscription
In 1936 seventy-five percent of Pennsylvania farms had no electric service. During the next five years, with Federal support, 14 consumer-owned cooperatives were formed in the State. Claverack Rural Electric Cooperative, serving parts of eight northeastern Pennsylvania counties, was incorporated October 24, 1936.
Erected by Pennsylvania Historical and Museum Commission
The Story
In 1936, three of every four Pennsylvania farms still had no electricity, their families living much as their grandparents had. With federal backing from the New Deal, farmers banded together into consumer-owned cooperatives to string their own lines, and the Claverack Rural Electric Cooperative, incorporated that October, brought power to parts of eight northeastern counties. Within five years fourteen such co-ops had transformed rural life across the state.
Why it matters
Rural electrification closed the gap between country and city, bringing the machinery, light, and modern comforts of the twentieth century to America's farms.
The story behind this marker
AI contextThe era
By the middle of the 1930s, city dwellers had spent a generation getting used to electric light, refrigerators, and radios — while much of the American countryside still lived by lamplight and hand labor. In Pennsylvania, three of every four farms had no electric service at all, a gap that split the modern world neatly along the town line.
The reason was economics, not indifference. Private utilities made their money serving customers packed close together, and running miles of line out to scattered farmhouses simply didn't pay. So the wires stopped where the profits did, and rural families kept doing after dark, and by muscle, what their neighbors in town had already handed off to a wall socket.
The New Deal changed the calculation. With federal support behind them, farmers no longer had to wait for a company to decide their hollow was worth wiring. They could organize, borrow, and build the lines themselves — and in the northeastern counties of Pennsylvania, that is exactly what they set out to do.
People & events
The vehicle for that change was the electric cooperative: a utility owned not by distant shareholders but by the very people it served. Instead of waiting to be chosen as customers, farmers became members and part-owners of the enterprise stringing wire to their own barns.
In this corner of the state, that idea took the shape of the Claverack Rural Electric Cooperative, incorporated on October 24, 1936, and reaching across parts of eight northeastern Pennsylvania counties. Its founding sits in a remarkable burst of activity: in the five years after 1936, fourteen such consumer-owned cooperatives were formed across the state, each one a local answer to the same statewide problem.
Behind that tidy count lies hard, unglamorous work — surveying routes, signing up neighbors, setting poles across farm country, and hanging line mile after mile. Every household connected meant one more family stepping out of the nineteenth century, often within living memory of the people who did the wiring.
Its place in the American story
Rural electrification was one of the great equalizers in American life. It closed a divide that had left the countryside a step behind the city in nearly everything that depended on power — lighting, water pumping, refrigeration, and the machinery that eased the brutal labor of the farm.
What happened across these eight counties was part of a national movement, repeated in thousands of communities where cooperatives brought electricity to places the market had passed over. It rewired not just barns and kitchens but expectations, letting rural families share in the comforts and productivity that the twentieth century had, until then, reserved for towns.
And the model itself was significant: ordinary people pooling their credit and their labor, with federal backing, to build essential infrastructure they then owned together. Many of those cooperatives still keep the lights on today, a durable reminder of what neighbors managed when they stopped waiting to be served.
If you visit
Standing in this stretch of northeastern Pennsylvania farm country, you're looking at the kind of landscape that made rural electrification necessary — open, rolling, and spread out, with homes set far apart across the hills.
Let your eye follow the power lines running along the roads and back to the farms. Lines like these were once revolutionary here, and it's worth remembering that within living memory these fields lay dark after sunset, the work done by lamplight and hand. The wires you barely notice are the whole point of the story.
This is a fine stop for a slow, scenic drive rather than a bucket-list destination. Pair it with the surrounding countryside and small towns, and read the marker as an invitation to see ordinary rural infrastructure for the hard-won achievement it actually was.
Written by AI to add context, grounded in the marker’s inscription and the historical record. The inscription above is the original, unaltered text.
Own a business near here? Add it to the map.
Related events
- · Rural Electrification Administration
Themes & tags
Nearby & related markers
Century Farm Program
Towanda, PA · est. 2021
In 1949 the Bradford County Historical Society, then housed in the courthouse annex in Towanda, launched Pennsylvania's first Century Farm program, modeled on New York's Order of Century Farmers. The idea was simple and enduring: honor farms held and worked by the same family for a hundred years or more. In 1976 the state Department of Agriculture adopted the model, and it has since recognized more than 2,000 Century and Bicentennial Farms across Pennsylvania.
Stephen Foster
Athens, PA · est. 1947
Before he became the father of American popular song, a teenaged Stephen Foster passed through the Susquehanna country of northern Pennsylvania. In 1840-41 he attended Athens Academy, a small classical school that once stood on this ground, and it was here that he composed his very first piece of music, the "Tioga Waltz." The tune reportedly grew out of a school exhibition, an early flash of the melodic gift that would soon give America "Oh! Susanna" and "Camptown Races."
Forksville CCC Camp S-95
Forks Township, PA
During the depths of the Great Depression, the Civilian Conservation Corps put hundreds of thousands of young men to work restoring America's forests, streams, and parklands. From 1933 to 1941, Camp S-95 stood here in the wooded hills of Sullivan County, its enrollees planting trees, fighting fires, and building the trails and infrastructure that still shape Pennsylvania's public lands. In exchange for a small wage sent largely home to their families, these workers gained steady labor, discipline, and a sense of purpose amid hard times.
Old Woolen Factory
Forksville, PA · est. 1951
A short distance southeast along Loyalsock Creek, Samuel Rogers, Jr. established a factory in 1810 that put the region's water power to work. During the War of 1812 it wove kersey — a coarse, sturdy woolen cloth — to clothe American soldiers, tying this remote valley to the national war effort. A flood in 1816 halted the works, cutting short one of the area's earliest industrial ventures.