Number of words: 192

Like the large telecommunications companies today, the private electric utilities in the United States had connected the towns along the major highways but skirted the less populated areas, which were mostly farms. These companies had decided that they couldn’t recoup the cost of extending their lines into far flung swaths of rural America. And even if these rural communities were connected, the electric companies assumed American farmers, who had been particularly hard hit by the Depression, would never be able to pay for the monthly service.

This lack of electricity not only denied farmers the convenience and comfort of the modern age, it also shut them out of the nation’s economic recovery. Those eager to plug into the nation’s new economy had to pay private electric companies exorbitant fees to stretch lines to their land. In Pennsylvania, John Earl George was told he’d have to pay $471 to the Pennsylvania Electric Company to extend a line 1,100 feet to his home in rural Derry Township. In 1939, $471 was the average annual wage in rural Pennsylvania.

Excerpted from pages 192 to 194 of ‘Tools and Weapons’ by Brad Smith and Carol Browne