ADVERTISEMENT
ADVERTISEMENT
MAPLE GROVE — Imagine life without electricity.
No lights when the sun goes down. No refrigerator. No running water from an electric pump. Just kerosene lanterns, wood-burning stoves and the kind of grueling manual labor that aged people well before their time.
ADVERTISEMENT
That was the reality for nine out of 10 rural Americans in the mid-1930s. While cities hummed with electric lights, appliances and industry, farm families across Minnesota and the rest of the country were left in the dark. Not because the technology did not exist, but because nobody thought they were worth the investment.
For-profit utility companies looked at rural America and saw a bad business deal. Farms were spread out. Towns were small. Stringing miles of power lines to reach a handful of customers did not pencil out on a balance sheet. Fewer than 7% of Minnesota’s farms had electric service. The families who did have power paid steep rates, well beyond what most farm families could afford during the Great Depression.
On May 20, 1936, President Franklin D. Roosevelt signed the Rural Electrification Act into law, creating a federal loan program that would change rural America forever. But the law alone did not flip the switch. The for-profit utilities still were not interested. Loan applications from established power companies barely trickled in.
So rural people did what rural people have always done. They figured it out themselves.
Across the country, rural families banded together to form electric cooperatives, not-for-profit utilities owned and governed by the very people they served. They pooled resources, secured low-interest federal loans and started building power lines across the countryside.
After the REA was established, Minnesota moved quickly. By November 1936, a Minnesota co-op had already powered up its first REA-funded lines. A demonstration farm on the Charles Ness property near Litchfield hosted more than 34,000 visitors in two years, all eager to see what electricity could do for a farm family.
The movement spread fast. Within four years after World War II, the number of rural electric systems in operation doubled. The number of consumers connected more than tripled. By 1953, more than 90% of American farms had electricity. Generations of families still tell the stories about “the night the lights came on.”
ADVERTISEMENT
What made this possible was not just federal funding. It was the cooperative model itself.
Electric cooperatives are not-for-profit. They do not answer to shareholders on Wall Street. They answer to the members they serve. Every cooperative member has a voice and a vote. Boards of directors are elected from the membership, people who live in the community, drive the same roads and understand the challenges their neighbors face. Excess revenue is not sent to distant investors. It is reinvested in the system or returned to members.
That structure was not an accident. It was the whole point. When the rest of the economy decided rural America was not worth serving, local people built their own utility and made sure it would never forget who it belonged to. This is local democracy at its best.
Today, Minnesota’s 44 distribution cooperatives and six generation and transmission cooperatives serve more than 1.7 million people across 85% of the state’s land mass, reaching into all 87 counties. They operate and maintain more than 135,000 miles of distribution lines, more than any other electricity provider in the state.
And the cooperative mission has not changed. Electric co-ops are still led locally, still not-for-profit and still focused on the communities they call home. They are expanding rural broadband, integrating renewable energy, investing in electric vehicle infrastructure and finding new ways to keep power affordable and reliable.
Ninety years ago, rural Americans were told they were not worth the trouble. They proved otherwise. They built something that belonged to them, governed by them, for their benefit. That is the cooperative difference, and it is as important today as it was the night the lights first came on.
ADVERTISEMENT
ADVERTISEMENT
ADVERTISEMENT

source