DUANE
Duane's take
Here's how the official marker tells it, and I'm gonna do my best to do it justice. Now, picture this: it's 1905, and the town of Bartlett's got the lights on. Regular electric service, humming right along.
But step outside the city limits — step out onto the farms stretching across that Bell County countryside — and brother, it is dark. Thirty years of dark. While the town glowed, the rural folks around Bartlett were doing what farmers had always done: making do without.
Thirty years is a long time to wait on something the town's already taking for granted. But help was coming, and it was coming from Washington. On May 11, 1935, President Franklin Delano Roosevelt signed an executive order — part of his New Deal emergency relief program — establishing the Rural Electrification Administration.
The REA. Designed to bring electricity to the rural areas of America, it also worked as a lending agency to help finance exactly the kind of project that rural Bartlett needed. And in 1935, the REA put its money where its mission was: thirty-three thousand dollars, lent to the Bartlett Community Light and Power Company.
The BCL&P got to work. They built a fifty-nine-mile power line to serve those surrounding rural areas. Fifty-nine miles of wire stretching out to farms that had never seen the flip of a switch.
The first section of that line was built to serve a hundred and ten farm homes, and in March of 1936, it went live — powered by the city's own municipal light plant, which had been built just two years before. Now here's where the story gets bigger than Bartlett, bigger than Bell County, bigger than Texas. That cooperative — later known as the Bartlett Electric Cooperative — wasn't just the first REA project in Texas.
It was the first REA project in the entire nation to be energized under an REA loan. The very first. Out of all the farms, all the rural communities across this whole country waiting on the light to come on, it came on here first.
A hundred and ten farm homes outside a small Texas town, and they led the way for the rest of America. That's not a footnote. That's a legacy.
What the marker says
Although the town of Bartlett had regular electric service by 1905, farmers in the surrounding rural area were not supplied with electricity until thirty years later. On May 11, 1935, President Franklin Delano Roosevelt signed an executive order establishing the Rural Electrification Administration (REA) as part of his New Deal emergency relief program. Designed to bring electricity to the rural areas of America, the REA also became a lending agency to help finance such projects. In 1935, the REA lent $33,000 to the Bartlett Community Light & Power Company. Later known as the Bartlett Electric Cooperative, the BCL&P built a 59-mile power line to serve the rural areas surrounding Bartlett. The first section of the line, which was to serve 110 farm homes, became operative in March 1936. Power was provided by the city's municipal light plant, which had been built two years earlier. As the first REA project in Texas and the first in the nation to be energized under an REA loan, the Bartlett Electric Cooperative played an important role in the modernization of area farms.