Little town was first to light up countryside
BARTLETT — I never knew my grandmother on my dad’s side. She died in 1931, having lived her whole life within 6 miles of the little town where she was born. She was a sturdy farm woman, according to notes I rediscovered recently, notes I made years ago while interviewing now-departed aunts and uncles. She was a good cook, they told me. She spent her days washing, ironing, quilting and sometimes picking cotton. She was thrifty, they said. She always had a garden and sold eggs, butter and produce to pay for her youngest son’s piano lessons. Her name was Mary Della. Her family called her Dell.
An uncle told me her five children always felt pangs of regret that their mother lived her whole life without modern conveniences. No electricity. No indoor toilet. No running water.
My grandmother lived and died long ago, and yet my notes remind me that I’m only two generations removed from a way of life almost as primitive as someone living centuries ago. One of the few differences between my grandmother’s daily life and her rural forebears in Ireland and Wales was a family car, a Model T my grandfather purchased toward the end of her life for about $400.
I came to this little Central Texas town, one of three farming communities between Taylor and Temple — Granger, Bartlett and Holland — because it enjoys the distinction of being the first in America where country folks like my grandmother finally said, “Enough.” In 1936, Bartlett-area farmers and ranchers, through their newly formed electric cooperative, became the first in America to take advantage of the
Rural Electrification Administration, the federal program created to bring power and light to the darkened countryside.
It’s hard to imagine how drastic the change was for millions of rural Americans. Maybe the advent of smartphones is similar, but the nowubiquitous device has not changed lives as pervasively as the coming of electricity nearly 85 years ago.
City people, including Bartlett residents, had electricity since the early years of the century, but not their country cousins. Private power companies insisted they couldn’t make a profit supplying power to scattered farms, ranches and small communities. Their resistance meant that farm and
ranch wives continued cooking on wood stoves and husbands finished up backbreaking chores in the dark, while children did their homework by the dim light of coal-oil lamps.
For two decades and more, delegations of farmers would visit “the paneled offices of utility-company executives to ask to be allowed to enter the age of electricity,” as LBJ biographer Robert Caro has written. Imagine a stuffed-shirt executive behind his desk telling hat-in-hand farmers in tones of infuriating condescension that it was too expensive to build lines to their farms. And even if the lines were built, he’d lecture them, you people would hardly use any electricity because you can’t afford to buy electrical appliances. Furthermore, you wouldn’t be able to pay your monthly electric bills, since, due to low usage, we’d have to charge you more than we charge town folks.
The catalyst for taking power to the countryside was the heartbreak and dislocation of the Great Depression. Franklin Roosevelt was elected president in 1932, vowing to address the suffering head-on. Two months after his inauguration, the Tennessee Valley Authority was created and set to work building 21 dams, thus bringing electricity to tens of thousands of farm families.
On May 11, 1935, FDR signed an executive order establishing the Rural Electrification Administration. A year later, Congress passed the new REA bill. Within the next 18 months, a half-million American farms got electricity.
Rural Texas stayed dark longer than most states, particularly in areas where low population density made even REA loans difficult to get. A young congressman from the Hill Country told his constituents, “I’ll get it for you.”
Lyndon Johnson’s constituents were reluctant — and suspicious. It would make their lives easier, no doubt about it, but it was a government program; they were suspicious of big government. The power companies would figure out a way to take advantage of them. They just weren’t sure.
Johnson took it upon himself to persuade them. Caro quotes a longtime Johnson associate: “He played on the emotions of women. He talked about his mother, and how he had watched her hauling buckets of water from the river and rubbing her knuckles off on the scrub board. Electricity help them pump their water and wash their clothes, he said. When they got refrigerators, they would no longer have to start fresh every morning with the cooking. ‘You’ll look younger at forty than your mother,’ he told them.”
Gradually, LBJ’s Hill Country and the rest of rural Texas began connecting to the rest of America, connecting to the 20th century. Bartlett was the first.
In 1935, according to a 2010 article in Texas Co-op Power Magazine — a magazine I used to edit — three local farmers each put up $50 to create what was originally named Bartlett Community Light & Power Company in a cooperative effort to bring power to farms outside the city limits. Later that year, BCL&P — later known as Bartlett Electric Cooperative — received a $33,000 loan from the REA to build a 59-mile power line.
In November 1935, volunteers and BCL&P employees began pounding utility poles into the ground and stringing line. On March 7, 1936, a local farmer named Charles Saage paid a $5 deposit for an electric meter and was given the honor of throwing the switch.
The old farmhouse where Charles and Lydia Saage (pronounced Soggy) raised their four children disappeared long ago. The Saages and their children also have passed on, although in 2010, a 90-yearold daughter-in-law, Mary Saage, showed the magazine’s Charles Boisseau where the farmhouse had been.
Mary Saage, who died in 2015 at age 96, was known as “the queen of Clark Street” because of her thriving antiques business on Bartlett’s main thoroughfare. That brick-paved street lined with tidy storefronts and sturdy brick buildings looks about like it did when she was born in Bartlett in 1919, with one significant difference: Most of the downtown buildings are empty.
The little town, with shady residential streets that give way to long, ironing board-flat corn and cotton fields, looks like a movie set. In fact, it has been a movie set — “The Stars Fell on Henrietta,” “The Newton Boys,” “The Whole Wide World,” “Fear the Walking Dead.”
“There is still a strong farming and ranching presence,” BEC’s general manager, Bryan Lightfoot, told me by email last week. “However, more and more of our members are living rurally and commuting to jobs in Georgetown, Temple, Round Rock, etc.” (That helps explain why downtown Bartlett is deserted.)
These days the pioneering co-op serves some 12,000 members in four counties. On the wall outside Lightfoot’s Bartlett office is a framed document, Charles Saage’s first application for service. It’s a reminder to Lightfoot and to co-op members that the organization’s place in Texas history, albeit little known, still shines brightly.