The Night the Lights Came On
In 1935, about nine American farms in ten had no electricity, and a committee of the electric utility industry told Washington there were "very few farms requiring electricity for major farm purposes that are not now served." The Rural Electrification Administration was created that May by an executive order less than two pages long.
Transcript
Nine in ten
R001 Five children of Pomp Hall, Negro tenant farmer, studying their lessons by lamplight. Creek County, Oklahoma. See general caption number 23
Russell Lee · Oklahoma · 1940 · Library of Congress · colorized 2026. View the original.
Nine American farms in ten had no electricity in nineteen thirty-five. The power companies said there was hardly anyone left to serve.
R002 Mrs. Sauer hanging up oil lamp. Cavalier County, North Dakota
John Vachon · North Dakota · 1940 · Library of Congress · colorized 2026. View the original.
Both of those things are in the record. So is what the government did about it, and what a Kentucky farmer remembered forty years later about the night the lights came on.
R003 Corner of living room. Mexican house, Crystal City, Texas. Kerosene lamps are used for lighting
Russell Lee · Crystal City, Texas · 1939 · Library of Congress · colorized 2026. View the original.
One thing first. These negatives are black and white. The color was put on by a computer this year — a good guess, not a record.
By lamplight
R004 Part of Pomp Hall's family eating supper by lamplight, Creek County, Oklahoma. See general caption number 23
Russell Lee · Oklahoma · 1940 · Library of Congress · colorized 2026. View the original.
Creek County, Oklahoma, February of nineteen forty. Russell Lee's caption says part of Pomp Hall's family eating supper by lamplight.
R005 Wife of Pomp Hall, Negro tenant farmer, cleaning lamp chimneys. Creek County, Oklahoma. See general caption number 23
Russell Lee · Oklahoma · 1940 · Library of Congress · colorized 2026. View the original.
Mrs. Hall, cleaning the lamp chimneys. That was a daily job; a sooted chimney was a dim lamp.
R006 Mrs. Sauer putting oil in lamp. Cavalier County, North Dakota
John Vachon · North Dakota · 1940 · Library of Congress · colorized 2026. View the original.
Cavalier County, North Dakota, October of the same year. John Vachon photographed Mrs. Sauer putting oil in the lamp.
R007 Oldest son of the Sauer family pumping water. Cavalier County, North Dakota
John Vachon · North Dakota · 1940 · Library of Congress · colorized 2026. View the original.
Her oldest son, pumping water. Every gallon the house used came up by hand.
R008 Drawing water from the well in the early morning. Farm of Pomp Hall, Negro tenant farmer. Creek County, Oklahoma. See general caption number 23
Russell Lee · Oklahoma · 1940 · Library of Congress · colorized 2026. View the original.
Back in Oklahoma, the Hall farm before sunrise. Lee's caption: drawing water from the well in the early morning.
R009 Daughter of Pomp Hall, Negro tenant farmer, building fire in the morning. Smoke is in her eyes. Creek County, Oklahoma. See general caption number 23
Russell Lee · Oklahoma · 1940 · Library of Congress · colorized 2026. View the original.
The daughter of the house, building the fire. His caption adds four words. Smoke is in her eyes.
R010 Wife of Pomp Hall, Negro tenant farmer, combing her hair in the morning. Creek County, Oklahoma. See general caption number 23
Russell Lee · Oklahoma · 1940 · Library of Congress · colorized 2026. View the original.
Mrs. Hall, combing her hair in the morning. The lamp is on the dresser. It is the only light in the room.
A government history of the program, written in nineteen sixty, describes the farm of nineteen thirty-five this way. His children studied by the dim light of a kerosene lamp; his wife was a slave to the wood range and washboard.
The same book puts the number on it. When the agency was created, the share of American farms with electricity was a scant eleven percent.
Two pages
The agency was the Rural Electrification Administration. It began as an executive order, number seven-oh-three-seven, signed on May eleventh, nineteen thirty-five. The book says the order was less than two pages long.
Its first administrator, Morris Cooke, expected the electric companies to build the lines with the government's money. Then he received a report from a committee the utility industry had formed to look into it.
The committee wrote that there were very few farms requiring electricity for major farm purposes that were not already served. The history adds the number beside that sentence. At that time, eighty-nine percent of all U.S. farms still lacked electricity.
When the first money went out in September of nineteen thirty-five, not one electric company was among the recipients. The first loans went to three electric cooperatives and one town.
R011 Sign illustrating electric cooperative, San Augustine, Texas
Russell Lee · San Augustine, Texas · 1939 · Library of Congress · colorized 2026. View the original.
That is what a cooperative was. Farmers signed up their neighbors, borrowed the money from the government, built the line, and owned it. This sign stood in San Augustine, Texas, in nineteen thirty-nine. Deep East Texas Electric Cooperative. Cooperative electricity.
R012 County agent and farmer examining map which shows location of REA (Rural Electrification Administration) farms. Grundy County, Iowa
John Vachon · Iowa · 1940 · Library of Congress · colorized 2026. View the original.
Grundy County, Iowa, April nineteen forty. The county agent and a farmer at the map of the county's R.E.A. farms.
R013 Explaining the REA program to farm women, Central Iowa 4-H Club fair, Marshalltown, Iowa
Arthur Rothstein · Marshalltown, Iowa · 1939 · Library of Congress · colorized 2026. View the original.
Marshalltown, Iowa, September nineteen thirty-nine. Arthur Rothstein's caption: explaining the R.E.A. program to farm women, at the 4-H Club fair.
The line goes out
R015 A REA (Rural Electrification Administration) line through the pines in Greene County, Georgia
Jack Delano · Georgia · 1941 · Library of Congress · colorized 2026. View the original.
Greene County, Georgia, May nineteen forty-one. Jack Delano's caption is one line. An R.E.A. line through the pines.
R016 Negro tenant farmer's house showing REA (Rural Electrification Administration) electric meter on wall. Greene County, Georgia
Jack Delano · Georgia · 1941 · Library of Congress · colorized 2026. View the original.
Same county, same month. A Black tenant farmer's house, the caption says, showing the R.E.A. electric meter on the wall.
R017 REA (Rural Electrification Administration) line going to a home in Caswell County, North Carolina
Marion Post Wolcott · North Carolina · 1940 · Library of Congress · colorized 2026. View the original.
Caswell County, North Carolina, October nineteen forty. Marion Post Wolcott. An R.E.A. line going to a home.
R018 Entrance to Williams' dugout basement home (Note rural electrification). Dead Ox Flat, Malheur County, Oregon. General caption number 67-111
Dorothea Lange · Dead Ox Flat, Oregon · 1939 · Library of Congress · colorized 2026. View the original.
Dead Ox Flat, Oregon, October nineteen thirty-nine. Dorothea Lange photographed the entrance to the Williams family's dugout basement home, and wrote in her caption, note rural electrification. The pole is at the door.
R020 Power lines along highway in Dawson County, Texas
Russell Lee · Texas · 1940 · Library of Congress · colorized 2026. View the original.
Dawson County, Texas, March nineteen forty. Power lines along the highway. The photographers had started noticing poles.
So had the power companies. The history records what they did once the cooperatives began organizing. Spite lines — lines built almost overnight after a cooperative was organized, and which paralleled the proposed co-op lines.
Hayti, Missouri
It quotes the agency's own report to Congress from nineteen thirty-seven. Private companies were building short extensions which, in the report's words, skim the cream of areas where the R.E.A. lacked the money to act.
R021 Hayti, Missouri. Erecting a new pole on a U.S. Rural Electrification Administration (REA) line
Arthur Rothstein · Hayti, Missouri · 1942 · Library of Congress · colorized 2026. View the original.
Hayti, Missouri, July nineteen forty-two. Rothstein spent days with one cooperative. This is a new pole going up on its line.
R022 Hayti, Missouri. U.S. Rural Electrification Administration (REA) cooperative lineman
Arthur Rothstein · Hayti, Missouri · 1942 · Library of Congress · colorized 2026. View the original.
A lineman on the line.
R023 Hayti, Missouri. U.S. Rural Electrification Administration (REA) lineman with copper wire
Arthur Rothstein · Hayti, Missouri · 1942 · Library of Congress · colorized 2026. View the original.
A lineman with copper wire. By the summer of nineteen forty-two, copper was a war material and hard to get.
R024 Hayti, Missouri. U.S. Rural Electrification Administration (REA) cooperative maintenance truck at the substation
Arthur Rothstein · Hayti, Missouri · 1942 · Library of Congress · colorized 2026. View the original.
The cooperative's maintenance truck at the substation.
R027 Hayti, Missouri. Member of the U.S. Rural Electrification Administration (REA) cooperative at the annual meeting
Arthur Rothstein · Hayti, Missouri · 1942 · Library of Congress · colorized 2026. View the original.
The annual meeting. The sign over the door reads Pemiscot Dunklin Electric Cooperative. Two counties, one line.
R029 Hayti, Missouri. President of the U.S. Rural Electrification Administration (REA) cooperative making a speech at the annual meeting
Arthur Rothstein · Hayti, Missouri · 1942 · Library of Congress · colorized 2026. View the original.
The president of the cooperative, making a speech. The chart on the easel is headed Co-ops in America.
R030 Hayti, Missouri. President of the U.S. Rural Electrification Administration (REA) cooperative making a speech at the annual meeting
Arthur Rothstein · Hayti, Missouri · 1942 · Library of Congress · colorized 2026. View the original.
Same speech, different chart. This one is headed What a Successful R.E.A. Co-op Means.
Members
R032 Hayti, Missouri. Member of the U.S. Rural Electrification Administration (REA) cooperative
Arthur Rothstein · Hayti, Missouri · 1942 · Library of Congress · colorized 2026. View the original.
Rothstein then photographed the members one at a time. His caption for each is the same. Member of the cooperative.
R033 Hayti, Missouri. Member of the U.S. Rural Electrification Administration (REA) cooperative
Arthur Rothstein · Hayti, Missouri · 1942 · Library of Congress · colorized 2026. View the original.
Member of the cooperative.
R036 Hayti, Missouri. President of the U.S. Rural Electrification Administration (REA) cooperative
Arthur Rothstein · Hayti, Missouri · 1942 · Library of Congress · colorized 2026. View the original.
The president.
R037 Hayti, Missouri. Manager of the U.S. Rural Electrification Administration (REA) cooperative
Arthur Rothstein · Hayti, Missouri · 1942 · Library of Congress · colorized 2026. View the original.
The manager, at a blackboard. The arithmetic on it is about meters and watts, worked out for the members who would pay the bill.
R039 Hayti, Missouri. Checking electric meters at the U.S. Rural Electrification Administration (REA) cooperative headquarters
Arthur Rothstein · Hayti, Missouri · 1942 · Library of Congress · colorized 2026. View the original.
Checking electric meters at the cooperative's headquarters. Every one of those was a farm.
What it was for
R041 Hayti, Missouri. President of the U.S. Rural Electrification Administration (REA) cooperative using an electric shaver
Arthur Rothstein · Hayti, Missouri · 1942 · Library of Congress · colorized 2026. View the original.
Then Rothstein went home with them. The president of the cooperative, using an electric shaver.
R043 Dunklin County, Missouri. Daughters of a U.S. Rural Electrification Administration (REA) cooperative member using electric appliance in their farm kitchen
Arthur Rothstein · Missouri · 1942 · Library of Congress · colorized 2026. View the original.
Dunklin County. The daughters of a member, the caption says, using an electric appliance in their farm kitchen.
R044 Dunklin County, Missouri. Son of a U.S. Rural Electrification Administration (REA) cooperative member at an electric refrigerator
Arthur Rothstein · Missouri · 1942 · Library of Congress · colorized 2026. View the original.
A member's son at an electric refrigerator. Before the line came, the government history says, the farm refrigerator was a dark cellar full of kraut jars, eggs in waterglass, and fried pork in lard.
R047 Dunklin County, Missouri. Farm boy using a lathe operated by U.S. Rural Electrification Administration (REA) power
Arthur Rothstein · Missouri · 1942 · Library of Congress · colorized 2026. View the original.
A farm boy at a lathe. These are not city trades. They are what a farm shop became once it had a motor.
R048 Dunklin County, Missouri. Tomato cannery using U.S. Rural Electrification Administration (REA) power
Arthur Rothstein · Missouri · 1942 · Library of Congress · colorized 2026. View the original.
A tomato cannery, running on the cooperative's power.
R052 Dunklin County, Missouri. Daughter of a U.S. Rural Electrification Administration (REA) cooperative member with a mule
Arthur Rothstein · Missouri · 1942 · Library of Congress · colorized 2026. View the original.
A member's daughter, with a mule. Rothstein's last frame in the county.
Other farms
R053 Vernon County, Wisconsin. Eddie Saugstad, member of the U.S. Rural Electrification Administration (REA) cooperative talking to a maintenance man
Arthur Rothstein · Wisconsin · 1942 · Library of Congress · colorized 2026. View the original.
Vernon County, Wisconsin, August nineteen forty-two. Eddie Saugstad, a member of his cooperative, talking to a maintenance man.
R056 Lauderdale County, Alabama. Tennessee Valley Authority (TVA). Julien H. Case repairing the transformer which brings TVA electricity to his farm. Case uses 900 kilowatt hours each month
Arthur Rothstein · Alabama · 1942 · Library of Congress · colorized 2026. View the original.
Lauderdale County, Alabama, June nineteen forty-two. Julien Case, repairing the transformer that brought TVA electricity to his farm. The caption says he used nine hundred kilowatt hours a month.
R059 Mrs. Foster at her electric refrigerator. Irwinville Farms, Georgia
John Vachon · Irwinville Farms, Georgia · 1938 · Library of Congress · colorized 2026. View the original.
Irwinville Farms, Georgia, May nineteen thirty-eight. Mrs. Foster at her electric refrigerator.
Then the war
By nineteen forty-two the share of electrified farms had reached thirty-eight percent. Seven years before, it was ten point nine.
Then the war put a virtual halt to rural construction. On a number of systems, the history says, there were poles along the road but no conductor to wire them.
R063 Fort Knox. Electric power line construction. Linemen, the "broadbacks" of the electrical industry, extend a new power line to Fort Knox, Kentucky, where American soldiers are training and hardening for the battles of democracy
Alfred T. Palmer · Fort Knox, Kentucky · 1942 · Library of Congress · colorized 2026. View the original.
The linemen kept climbing, for someone else. Fort Knox, Kentucky, June nineteen forty-two. Alfred Palmer, for the Office of War Information.
R064 Fort Knox. Electric power line construction. Linemen, the "broadbacks" of the electrical industry, extend a new power line to Fort Knox, Kentucky, where American soldiers are training and hardening for the battles of democracy
Alfred T. Palmer · Fort Knox, Kentucky · 1942 · Library of Congress · colorized 2026. View the original.
The caption calls them the broadbacks of the electrical industry, extending a new power line to Fort Knox.
R067 Fort Knox. Power line construction. This husky member of a construction crew, building a new 33,000-volt electric power line into Fort Knox, Kentucky, is performing an important war service. Thousands of soldiers are in training at Fort Knox, and the new line from a hydroelectric plant at Louisville is needed to supplement the existing power supply
Alfred T. Palmer · Fort Knox, Kentucky · 1942 · Library of Congress · colorized 2026. View the original.
Palmer's captions repeat one phrase for every man. This husky member of a construction crew.
R068 Fort Knox. Electric power line construction. A new electric power line for the Army. A pole line crew of a large construction company extends service into Fort Knox, Kentucky, where American soldiers are training and hardening for modern warfare
Alfred T. Palmer · Fort Knox, Kentucky · 1942 · Library of Congress · colorized 2026. View the original.
A pole line crew, on the road into Fort Knox. The farms on either side of that road would wait.
The job yet to be done
May twenty-second, nineteen forty-seven. The administrator of the R.E.A., Claude Wickard, wrote to a congressman from Mississippi who had asked how much of the job was left.
Two and a half million farm families, he wrote, were still living without electric light and power. And that was the electric industry's own estimate.
In a dozen years the share of electrified farms had gone from eleven percent to about fifty-seven.
Most of what was left was not in the West. Almost sixty percent of the unelectrified farms were east of the Mississippi. New York, Pennsylvania, Ohio and West Virginia together had more of them than the eleven westernmost states combined.
He attached the table. Farms without central station electric service, June thirtieth, nineteen forty-six. United States: two million six hundred seventy-seven thousand. Forty-five point seven percent.
Kentucky is on it. One hundred fifty thousand seven hundred ten farms without service. Sixty-three point two percent of the farms in the state, eleven years after the program began.
R069 One of the tenant houses which has electricity on Marcella Plantation. Mileston, Mississippi Delta, Mississippi
Marion Post Wolcott · Marcella Plantation, Mississippi · 1939 · Library of Congress · colorized 2026. View the original.
Mileston, Mississippi, October nineteen thirty-nine. Wolcott's caption says one of the tenant houses which has electricity on Marcella Plantation. Which has. The others did not.
Then Wickard wrote the sentence the letter is remembered for. It is inconceivable, in this Twentieth Century, that so many American citizens should still be living in the age of the kerosene lamp.
Approximately forty-three percent of the nation's farms, he wrote, were still unelectrified.
And reaching them would be the hardest part. The people still unserved were in the thinner, less densely settled areas. More effort, more material, and more dollars per consumer.
Two months earlier he had written to the cooperatives themselves. When the program started, ninety percent of rural America was without electric service. Now the job was about fifty percent complete.
And the old problem was back. The pre-war power company practice of building lines for cream-skimming purposes, he wrote, was being renewed, leaving the cooperatives the sparse sections and what he called the forgotten families.
His instruction was to survey every unserved house in the territory immediately, before more cream-skimming and spite-line construction could take place.
R070 Children of Pomp Hall, Negro tenant farmer, leaving for school in the early morning. Creek County, Oklahoma. See general caption number 23
Russell Lee · Oklahoma · 1940 · Library of Congress · colorized 2026. View the original.
The Hall children, leaving for school in the early morning. Whether the line ever reached that house, the file does not say.
The night the lights came on
The nineteen sixty history has a chapter called The Night the Lights Came On. It opens with a dairy farmer in Kentucky.
He had studied by a kerosene lamp in the kitchen, close to the stove. They had heard the government was going to lend them money for lights, he said, but did not believe it until they saw the men putting up the poles.
It was late on a November afternoon, just before dark. All they had was wires hanging from the ceiling in every room, with bare bulbs on the end. His father turned on the one in the kitchen first, and stood there holding the pull-chain. Carl, come here and hang onto this so I can turn on the light in the sitting room.
R071 Electric light fixtures have been installed by FSA (Farm Security Administration) rehabilitation borrower who rents from Indian. Yakima County, Washington
Russell Lee · Washington · 1941 · Library of Congress · colorized 2026. View the original.
He knew his father did not have to do that, he said, and told him it would stay on. Yakima County, Washington, nineteen forty-one. Light fixtures a farm family had just had installed.
That night, the book says, was forever after an important date in most farm families, ranking with marriages and births. In countless homes the lights stayed on all night, with people getting a good look at the rooms — and at each other.
At a crossroads in Texas, the night the lines were energized, ranchers filed past a newly dug grave and threw their kerosene lamps into it.
R072 Housewife removing articles from electric refrigerator in farm home. Lake Dick Project, Arkanas
Russell Lee · Lake Dick Project, Arkansas · 1938 · Library of Congress · colorized 2026. View the original.
In a farmhouse in Missouri, the book says, a woman ignored the lamps that had come on and ran to the kitchen, where a new refrigerator had stood for a month waiting for the current. Lake Dick, Arkansas, nineteen thirty-eight.
What is left
The agency's own chart, nineteen thirty-five to nineteen fifty-nine. Eleven percent to about ninety-seven. Most of the climb is after the war, and most of it was built by cooperatives the farmers owned.
R073 Sauer children going to school. Cavalier County North Dakota
John Vachon · North Dakota · 1940 · Library of Congress · colorized 2026. View the original.
The Sauer children, going to school, October nineteen forty. Their mother had filled the lamp that morning.
R074 Five children of Pomp Hall, Negro tenant farmer, studying their lessons by lamplight. Creek County, Oklahoma. See general caption number 23
Russell Lee · Oklahoma · 1940 · Library of Congress · colorized 2026. View the original.
What is left is the lines along the roads, and the people who remember the night. If your family was on a farm then, the comments are open.
Sources
- Claude R. Wickard, Administrator, Rural Electrification Administration, to Rep. Jamie L. Whitten, May 22, 1947, "relative to the job yet to be done in rural electrification," with table "Farms Without Central Station Electric Service" (June 30 and Dec. 31, 1946). USDA National Agricultural Library copy, archive.org/details/CAT31016858 - "It is inconceivable, in this Twentieth Century, that so many American citizens should still be living in the age of the kerosene lamp." (p. 2) - United States, June 30, 1946: 2,677,036 farms without service, 45.7 percent; Kentucky 150,710, 63.2 percent. The typed number columns sit one line below the state names; read with that offset.
- Rural Electrification Administration, *Rural Lines, USA: The Story of the Rural Electrification Administration's First Twenty-five Years, 1935–1960* (USDA Misc. Pub. 811, 1960). archive.org/details/rurallinesusasto811unit_0 - p. 3: farms electrified "from a scant 11 percent to around 97 percent"; p. 7: Executive Order 7037, May 11, 1935; p. 8: the utility committee's report ("very few farms requiring electricity … not now served"), 89 percent, and the first loans of September 1935; p. 20: spite lines and the 1937 report's "skim the cream"; p. 23: "The Night the Lights Came On"; p. 33: 10.9 to 38.3 percent and the wartime halt; p. 36: the chart.
- Rural Electrification Administration, *Finishing the Job: A Program for Area Coverage Electrification* (March 5, 1947). archive.org/details/CAT31014966 - p. 3: "When the REA program started, 90 percent of rural America was without electric service"; "about 50 percent complete"; "cream-skimming"; "spite-line construction."
- Photographs: Farm Security Administration / Office of War Information black-and-white negatives, Library of Congress Prints & Photographs Division (LC-USF33, LC-USF34, LC-USW3), 1938–1942 — Russell Lee (Creek County, Okla.; San Augustine and Crystal City, Tex.; Yakima; Lake Dick, Ark.; Auburn, Calif.), John Vachon (Cavalier County, N.D.; Grundy County, Iowa; Irwinville, Ga.), Arthur Rothstein (Hayti and Dunklin County, Mo.; Vernon County, Wis.; Marshalltown and Grundy County, Iowa; TVA farms in Alabama and Tennessee; Uinta County, Wyo.), Jack Delano (Greene County, Ga.), Marion Post Wolcott (Caswell County, N.C.; Mileston, Miss.), Dorothea Lange (Dead Ox Flat, Ore.), Alfred T. Palmer (Fort Knox, Ky.). Federal works, public domain. loc.gov/pictures/collection/fsa/
- Colorization: the negatives are black and white. Color was added in 2026 with DDColor (open-source), then audited with the channel's spot-fix pass; it is a computer's guess and is not part of the record. Captions are quoted from the Library of Congress catalog records.