In the 1880s, electricity began making its way into Texas cities like San Antonio, bringing lights, refrigeration and other conveniences of modern life. Not so for rural Texas, which remained without power for another 50 years.
The story of how electricity finally came to the ranches, farms and tiny communities of rural Texas is told in Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist Joe Holley’s latest book, Power: How the Electric Co-Op Movement Energized the Lone Star State.
Holley has been the “Native Texan” columnist for the Houston Chronicle since 2013 and is the author of several books, including Hometown Texas, a collection of his weekly “Native Texan” columns, Hurricane Season: The Unforgettable Story of the Houston Astros and the Resilience of a City and Sutherland Springs: God, Guns and Hope in a Small Texas Town, which earned the Texas Institute of Letters’ Carr P. Collins Award for the year’s best work of nonfiction.
Speaking on the bigcitysmalltown podcast, Holley told host Robert Rivard that in 1933, his mother graduated from high school in Bigfoot, Texas, an unincorporated community about 40 miles south of San Antonio where his grandmother ran a general store and meat market. At the time, Bigfoot still didn’t have electricity, a half-century after San Antonio got connected.
It wasn’t profitable for electric companies to install poles and string wire across thousands of miles to connect single customers, so it simply didn’t happen.
It would take an act of Congress to finally bring light to rural communities across the U.S., via the Rural Electrification Act of 1936. The New Deal law provided federal loans to install poles and wires in rural areas. Funding was channeled through what became known as cooperative electric power companies.
Communities rushed to create these nonprofit co-ops, and today, 76 still serve more than 3 million “member-consumers” in Texas.
Holley once served as editor of Texas Co-op Power magazine, which began in 1944 as a way for co-ops to communicate with their members, and today — thanks in part to Holley’s influence — offers lively and award-winning stories about Texas people, food, travel, history and culture.
Tune in to episode 52 of bigcitysmalltown to hear Holley tell some of the stories of the rural Texans who, with the help of Washington, D.C., were able to take matters into their own hands and electrify their lives.
