“When the Lights Came On”: How Electric Cooperatives Transformed Rural South Carolina

Today, the South Carolina’s electric cooperatives serve over a quarter of South Carolina’s citizens and seventy percent of the state’s land area. From their inception, the electric cooperatives have been a social movement. Working together, rural South Carolinians formed cooperatives, aided by the New Deal, and brought electricity, one of the great modernizing essentials of the twentieth century, to the countryside. Led by the organizing efforts of farmers, teachers, agricultural extension agents, pastors and others, rural communities drew on their modest resources to become members, and cooperatives, with federal financial support, brought electricity to portions of the still unserved countryside. Without question rural electrification changed the daily routines and life experiences of rural people – black and white, men and women – repeatedly across the decades after the “lights came on” in rural South Carolina. When electric power came to their own households and they saw their own lives transformed by the convenience and comfort of electricity. Many rural South Carolinians felt their own sense of awe and amazement. No longer left out or left behind, tens of thousands of rural South Carolinians grasped that rural life was changing – chiefly for the better in their view. As cooperative member Hubert Waldrop of Laurens declared: “It was just a modern miracle when the lights came on.”