At one time or another, four different NRECA member-systems claimed to have been the first federally financed rural electric co-op in the nation. It’s easy to understand why: Numerous co-op projects were in the works in 1934-1936, and there are at least three ways to define first: first to organize/incorporate, first to get a federal loan, first to energize a line.

Mississippi’s Alcorn County Electric Power Association, known locally as ACE Power, got going in late 1934 after receiving a $154,000 loan from the Tennessee Valley Authority to purchase the municipal utility in the town of Corinth and start building lines out to the rural areas of the county.

But that TVA loan put an asterisk on ACE Power’s claim because all the other early co-ops got their start-up money from the Rural Electrification Administration. In fact, ACE Power was also known as the Corinth Experiment—a try-out for the REA program that would begin to roll out a year later.

Another Mississippi distribution system, Monroe County Electric Power Association in Amory, got a loan in September 1935 from REA, and started delivering power to its original 63 members possibly as early as February 15, 1936.

A tagline on the co-op’s website makes this claim: “The First REA Co-op in the United States.”

The Electric Cooperatives of Mississippi doesn’t go that far, however, saying the co-op was “the first electric power association in Mississippi to secure an REA loan and begin operations.”

Texas’s Bartlett Electric Cooperative (originally Bartlett Community Light & Power Company) also got a loan from REA in 1935. It used the money, $33,000, to build 59 miles of distribution line to serve farms outside the town of Bartlett. “The first section of the line, which was to serve 110 farm homes, became operative in March 1936,” says a historical marker there.

And then this: It was “the first REA project in Texas and the first in the nation to be energized under an REA loan.”

Finally, there’s Boone Rural Electric Membership Cooperative in Lebanon, Indiana, whose first REA loan, for $567,926, was approved on July 22, 1935—two months before Monroe County EPA. But it did not energize its first line (60 miles) until May 22, 1936, five months after the Mississippi co-op and two months after Texas’s Bartlett Electric.

And yet Power to the People: A History of Rural Electrification in Indiana, a book published by The Indiana Association of Rural Electric Cooperatives in 1985, credits the Thorntown home of Boone REMC director Clark Woody with being “the first in the country to receive electricity under the REA Act.”

This is technically true, because the legislation was signed into law by President Franklin Roosevelt just two days earlier, on May 20. But the book also makes much of the fact that the co-op set its first pole five months earlier, on January 9, 1936, and that REA Administrator Morris L. Cook traveled from Washington to attend the ceremony.

He referred to Boone REMC as “the first unit of a countrywide rural electrification project” in his speech.

Harvey Hull, head of Indiana’s Farm Bureau, followed Cooke to the front of the crowd of more than 100 and said that Boone County REMC could be a “testing ground for the practicability of cooperative distribution of rural electric power.” He also called on the federal government “to make available a revolving fund which may be used continuously until all feasible rural electrification projects have been served.”

It's as though both Cooke and Hull were planting a “first” flag in Indiana, for reasons probably more political than historical.

Maybe it doesn’t matter which of the four co-ops came first, or by what definition. More important is that they were in the vanguard of what was to become the most successful rural development program in U.S. history.