To celebrate its 50th anniversary, CFC has produced an online, comprehensive history that chronicles the organization's efforts to supply electric cooperatives and rural electric systems with the financial solutions needed to advance the quality of life across their service areas.

CFC plans to release a companion timeline later this year that looks at key "pre-CFC" rural electrification milestones, from 1906 when Congress authorized the preference principle for federal hydropower allocations up through the mid-1960s.

"At its core this project honors the intrepid founders of our nation's electric cooperatives, public power districts, public utility districts, electrical districts and mutual associations," Stambaugh comments. "When large investor-owned utilities in first part of the 20th century turned their backs on rural residents and refused to extend power lines into the countryside—claiming it wouldn't generate sufficient profit—these determined pioneers rolled up their sleeves, overcame organized opposition and provided their homes, farms, businesses and communities with safe, reliable, affordable and life-changing central station electric service. In the end, their self-reliant spirit, coupled with the not-for-profit, consumer-owned cooperative business model, lifted millions out of darkness and poverty and accomplished the greatest economic development and engineering feats of the modern era—the electrification of rural America."

The timeline can be found at cfc50.com.