Greenville's Electric Light Plant

In 1891 Greenville's city government bought and began operating an electricity generating plant, the first municipally owned utility system in Texas, the Handbook of Texas says. The town had finished its first water works only two years earlier, in 1889. The city's own history says the Greenville Electric Utility System remains the oldest municipally owned power system in the state. By 1892 Greenville reported 5,000 people, a daily and three weekly newspapers, an ice factory, a cotton compress and the machine shops of the Katy railroad.

What the plaque says

Greenville's Electric Light Plant First municipally owned electric plant in Texas. Opened Mar. 4, 1891, on Town Branch. Steam engine, operating only at night, ran 2 dynamos for 40 street arc and 1000 home lights. Daytime use began 1909. Diesel installed 1933. Now has 8 diesels plus steam engine. (1965)

Where it stands

Worth the stop nearby

• Audie Murphy / American Cotton Museum — 1.5 mi
  A Greenville museum of Hunt County's military heroes, including Audie Murphy, and of cotton, which keeps the engine of what it says was the world's largest inland cotton compress.
• Rockwall County Historical Foundation & Museum — 24 mi
  A small museum in Harry Myers Park that keeps the evidence on Rockwall's rock wall, sandstone dikes that geologists call natural and folk tales call built.
• Cooper Lake State Park — 30 mi
  Two units on Jim Chapman Lake, a Corps reservoir proposed in the late 1930s, stalled by a lawsuit until 1984 and dedicated in 1991, with a 10.5-mile equestrian trail and wildlife land around it.

More markers nearby

• Greenville — steps away
• Greenville Building and Loan Association — steps away
• The Seven Courthouses of Hunt County — steps away
• Hunt County's First Railroad — steps away