Poster

The Rural Electrification Authority was established on May 11, 1935. It brought electricity to millions of farms in the United States.

The Rural Electrification Authority was established with the goal of bringing electricity to the American farm. When the R.E.A. was created, only 11% of the farms in the country had electricity. The R.E.A. provided long-term, low-cost loans to build distribution systems to get electricity to the farms. The Tennessee Valley Authority in the East, and Grand Coulee, and Boulder Dams in the West provided much of the actual electricity. By the beginning of World War II, 50% of American farms had electricity. At the end of the 1940s, the number of American farms equipped with electricity rose to 95%.