A faded black-and-white photograph on Ozark Border Electric Cooperative's website shows 12 men crowded around a long, narrow table: the utility's 1947 board of directors. As you would expect for that era, all wear white dress shirts (most with ties) except for a slight, white-haired man on the right side who wears a Roman collar under a dark clerical suit.

“The area in Dunkin County Peters represented had the largest number of subscribers when the co-op got underway," says Jim McCarty, editor emeritus of Rural Missouri. “He would serve on the board as vice president from 1939 until 1955."

McCarty added that Rev. F.G. Wanglin was another organizer of Ozark Border Electric, and at least two other Missouri co-ops had clergy in their corner back then.

Peters would have been acquainted with Father Hubert J. Eggemann, a founding board member of Scott-Madrid-Mississippi Electric Cooperative (now SEMO Electric Cooperative), McCarty points out, because the two co-ops are neighbors. Eggemann, who was the pastor of St. Lawrence Catholic Church in New Hamburg, used his influence on the board to get a line extended to the church's picnic grounds.

Peters was born in Munsterland, Germany, in 1873. His family emigrated to the U.S. in 1888 and settled near Glasgow in central Missouri. He was ordained as a priest in 1898. In 1905, Father John J. Glennon, the archbishop of St. Louis (later a cardinal), asked him to lead the colonization of a 12,000-acre tract of swampy land in Dunkin County owned by the church.

Wilden E. Roberts, public relations director for Ozark Border Electric, described the tract in the July-August 1948 issue of Rural Electric Missourian, precurser to Rural Missouri: “The area could only be reached on horseback, when it could be reached at all, and living conditions were primitive even to the lack of safe drinking water." On top of that it was “subject to seasonal overflows from the St. Francis River, was low, swampy, cut-over timberland with little value for agricultural purposes."

Against these odds, Peters and his band of German immigrants, which included his parents and two brothers, started building a town.

First, they had to clear the land for farming and mill the trees they felled.

“Cutting over a million feet of lumber while serving as his own head sawyer, Rev. Peters planned and built the church and numerous other buildings, including two grade schools and a high school," Roberts wrote. To create jobs, he built an ax handle factory and a stave mill (for making barrels).

“When the prospect of securing electricity for the rural areas became a reality with the advent of the REA, Father Peters devoted his energy and influence to aiding in the establishment of the Ozark Border Electric Cooperative at Poplar Bluff and has served on the co-op's board of directors continuously since its incorporation."

Peters was also one of the early proponents of the Wappapello Lake flood control project, which tamed the St. Francis River and made farming in Glennonville truly viable.

Good roads were needed to get crops to market, and the German priest tackled that, too.

“Believing that electrification and good roads were basic needs of rural people, Father Peters worked with the State Highway Commission and county road officals to secure a network of all-weather roads in the area he had been forced to traverse on horseback," Roberts said.

Father Fritz was rewarded long after he passed away when Associated Electric Cooperatative dedicated its St. Francis Power Plant in Glennonville in 1999.