Back in 2010, Charles Boisseau, a writer for Texas Co-op Power, drove an hour north from his office in Austin to the small town of Bartlett, the birthplace of the state's rural electrification program. He had the address of the first farmhouse to get power, but when he got there all he found was an overgrown acreage on a gravel road about a half mile outside of town.

Back at his desk the next day he started digging into the early history of Bartlett Electric Cooperative, a distribution system now serving close to 11,000 members and 14,300 meters in five very rural counties: Bell, Burleson, Milam, Williamson and Lee.

Boisseau learned that Bartlett proper got electric lights in 1905, but it was another 29 years before the farmers in the surrounding rural areas got them. This was, of course, the way electrification played out; nationwide, only 10 percent of American farms had power before the federal Rural Electrification Administration (REA) was created in 1935. 

That same year, three local farmers put up $50 each to create a utility originally named Bartlett Community Light & Power Company. BCL&P soon applied for a $33,000 loan from REA to build 59 miles of distribution lines. The farmers contracted with the municipal utility in town for power supply and other services, including meter reading.

BCL&P employees and volunteers began setting poles in November 1935. Three months later, on March 7, 1936, Charles Saage, the owner with his wife Lydia of that farmhouse Boisseau went looking for, threw the switch on the first section of line to be energized. This was a few days after they had put down a $5 deposit so an electric meter could be installed.   

“They were the first on the line going down that road out of Bartlett. That was the reason they got electricity before anybody else," Mary Saag, the 90-year-old widow of the Saag's son Curtis, told Boisseau.

Separate from Boisseau's research, Horace Keith, a BCL&P employee who later served as general manager, remembered in an oral history interview that it was “a 2,300-volt single-phase line," and it ran for two or three miles east of town “to some of the neighbors close in." 

The editor of the Bartlett Tribune summed up what was going on outside of town this way: "The movement now on foot to supply electricity to the rural homes surrounding Bartlett should meet with a welcome response from the citizenship of this community… Electricity comes as a willing and untiring servant to relieve those who work in the home of much tiresome labor. Rural homes need the benefits of electricity even more than town and city homes." 

Saag, whose first summer job was in BCL&P's office, showed Boisseau a black and white photo of her in-laws gable-roofed farmhouse, barn and out buildings. If you look closely, you can make out a slender power pole in the lower right-hand corner.

Boisseau pointed out that when the Texas legislature adopted the Electric Cooperative Corporation Act in 1937, BCL&P could obtain a state charter to organize as a member-owned electric co-op.

The inscription on a historical marker alongside State Highway 95, which passes through Bartlett's town center, says that “Bartlett Electric Cooperative played an important role in the modernization of area farms." It also says that it was the first REA-financed co-op in the U.S. to be energized. But at least three other NRECA member-systems make similar claims.