REAs transformed rural way of life

By JoAn Bjarko
North Forty News

Derek Roberts recalls that the arrival of electric lines at his family's Livermore ranch in 1948 was not the first use of electricity, but it certainly was a lot easier.

"We could hardly believe we could just turn a switch on," he said.

Prior to plentiful electricity provided by Poudre Valley Rural Electric Association, the Roberts Ranch had tried a variety of ways to generate electricity and store power in batteries. Roberts said his great uncle had a wind charger and his father produced power with a large diesel engine. Power was used sparingly, however, and he still did his homework by kerosene lamp. The refrigerator also ran on kerosene.

With electricity, the household was able to purchase an electric mixer, toaster, washing machine and of most importance to his grandmother, an electric sewing machine. "It made a dramatic difference in the way we lived," Roberts said.

His story is similar to thousands across the United States starting in 1935 when President Franklin Roosevelt signed Executive Order 7037 establishing the Rural Electrification Administration. The agency was instructed to "initiate a program to generate, transmit, and to distribute electricity in rural areas."

In 1936, Congress passed the Rural Electrification Act, which promoted the establishment of member-owned cooperatives as the means to provide this service in rural areas. This act enabled Poudre Valley and 22 other REAs in Colorado to begin.

Farmers in Larimer and Weld counties formed their REA in 1939. To get it started, more than 600 interested parties paid $5 each for membership. The first few miles of line were energized in 1940.

"What has taken place is a peaceful revolution transforming farm life in America," Marquis Childs wrote in a short history of the movement titled "The Farmer Takes a Hand."

While one would not think of rural electrification as a political issue, the movement's historians are full of tales about battles fought out in the halls of Congress over federal low-interest loans to the co-ops and over using loan money for generation and transmission. The nation's power companies continually fought to weaken or destroy efforts of the cooperatives, although they had no interest in delivering power to out-of-the-way homes, farms and ranches themselves.

The REA movement grew quickly, however. By the time the Japanese bombed Pearl Harbor on Dec. 7, 1941, the percentage of electrified farms had jumped in seven years from 11 percent to 38 percent, Clyde T. Ellis wrote in "A Giant Step."

World War II then suspended most line building because copper, aluminum and steel were materials needed in war production. Once the war ended, the demand to electrify rural America returned. By 1948, rural electrical cooperatives numbered nearly a thousand. Membership totaled nearly two million farm families.

In northern Colorado, most of the farms and ranches east of the foothills received electricity in the 1940s. The majority of lines serving Rist Canyon, Poudre Canyon and the Red Feather Lakes area were completed by the late 1950s, according to a PVREA history. Today, PVREA covers a 5,760-square-mile service territory in three counties with 3,766 miles of line. It has nearly 35,000 customers.