First Rural Power Electric Cooperative

Corinth's electric cooperative began with a meeting in a furniture store. In January 1934 Congressman John E. Rankin arranged for Alcorn County businessmen and a TVA official to gather at McPeters' Furniture Store, and they formed the association. Washington lent $114,632 at 3 percent. Members paid a fee, promised a minimum monthly use and wired their own homes and barns. Officials thought it would take 13 years to repay, then saw it would take less than half that. They reasoned that if it worked among cotton tenants and sharecroppers it could work anywhere.

Where it stands

Worth the stop nearby

• Corinth Civil War Interpretive Center — 1.8 mi
  A Park Service center at Battery Robinett telling why two railroads made Corinth a prize, from the siege of 1862 to the battle of October, and what happened to the people who sought freedom there.
• Corinth Contraband Camp — 2.6 mi
  The site of a Union-run town of freedom seekers in 1862 and 1863, with a quarter-mile walkway of life-size bronze figures and the origin of a Black regiment that fought at Brices Cross Roads.
• Big Hill Pond State Park — 14 mi
  A 4,000-acre bottomland park in McNairy County built around a pond that railroad crews dug in 1853, with a 70-foot tower over Dismal Swamp and Civil War earthworks.
• Shiloh Indian Mounds — 20 mi
  A National Historic Landmark on the Tennessee River bluff: the remains of a palisaded Mississippian-era town with seven mounds and the visible rings of its house sites, inside Shiloh National Military Park.

More markers nearby

• Battle of Corinth-1862 — 1.6 mi
• Bobby Gene Emmons — 1.7 mi
• Roscoe Turner — 1.8 mi
• Corinth — 1.8 mi