First REA Project in Kansas

In 1934 fewer than 11 percent of American farms had electricity, while in France and Germany nearly 90 percent did. President Franklin D. Roosevelt created the Rural Electrification Administration by executive order on May 11, 1935, and the Rural Electrification Act of the following year provided federal loans for distribution systems in rural areas. In 1939 rural electric cooperatives served 288,000 households, and most of those cooperatives had borrowed from the REA. By 1942 nearly half of the nation's farms had electricity, and by 1952 almost all of them did.

What the plaque says

First REA Project in Kansas At this site the first power pole for the Brown-Atchison Electric Cooperative was dedicated in special ceremony on November 10, 1937. Brown-Atchison was the first rural electric project to energize in Kansas financed by loan funds from the Rural Electrification Administration (REA). On April 1, 1938, central-station electricity generated at the Horton Power Plant was sent into the first section of line to farms in Brown and Atchison counties, signaling an end to darkness and drudgery for rural people. Thirty- eight other electric cooperatives followed in Kansas to deliver the wonders of electricity into every rural area of the state. Rural electrification became known as the best "hired hand" the farmer/rancher could have. Few other occurrences have impacted so positively on rural areas as has the rural electrification program. This marker is dedicated to all the rural electric cooperative pioneers in Kansas who proved that working together for their own and the common good, produces a better life for themselves and their neighbors. Erected by Kansas Electric Cooperatives and Kansas State Historical Society-1987

Where it stands

Worth the stop nearby

• Amelia Earhart Hangar Museum — 19 mi
  A hangar at Atchison's airport built around Muriel, a 1935 Lockheed Electra 10-E of the model Earhart vanished in, saved from scrap, restored over three decades and brought to her birthplace in 2016.
• Iowa and Sac & Fox Mission Museum — 20 mi
  The surviving part of an 1846 Presbyterian mission school near Highland, built largely with the tribes' own annuity money and returned to the Iowa Tribe of Kansas and Nebraska in 2021. Closed during remodeling.
• Prairie Peoples Park (Prairie Band Potawatomi Nation) — 29 mi
  The Prairie Band Potawatomi Nation's powwow grounds west of Mayetta, on the reservation the band held when most Potawatomi in Kansas took allotments and the promise of citizenship.

More markers nearby

• Battle of the Spurs — 14 mi
• Mormon Grove: The City That Disappeared — 18 mi
• Atchison — 21 mi
• The Lane Trail — 23 mi