Folklore of the Rural Electrification Administration through Oral Histories

Pictured above are employees at the early RECC office in Divernon. The cooperative moved to a new building near Auburn in 1954, which is Rural Electric Convenience Cooperative headquarters today.

While the Rural Electrification Administration (REA) undoubtedly changed the lives of many American farmers, not everyone viewed the changes as completely good. The academic sources and propaganda from the time focused solely on the positive aspects of Rural Electrification, it didn’t take long to find a that many oral histories show that people also experienced a sense of loss in the way life was before electricity completely changed their lives. In this way, we can see that folklore is important to a holistic study of any historical event, because it can offer another view of how these changes impacted people.

In the 1980’s, in celebration of the 50-year anniversary of the REA, the North Carolina Association of Electric Cooperatives gathered oral histories of people who lived through the great changes that happened with Rural Electrification in the 1930’s. One woman who was interviewed during that time was Mrs. W. D. Elliott. (Southern Oral History Program). Mrs. Elliott was born in 1911 and got electricity in her home in Chowan County, North Carolina in 1946. I was drawn to this woman’s history in particular because these changes happened when she was 35, which is the age I am now.

Mrs. Elliott says that while having electricity helped lessen the workload for her husband on the farm, and her in the house, it also took away some of the connections she was used to. People tended to stay home more in the evenings listening to the radio (and then the T.V.) instead of visiting with neighbors. She said that her husband preferred to listen to his programs instead of talk with her. Her children were mostly raised with electricity and she said it was hard for her to realize that they didn’t enjoy reading as much as she did, and she blamed it on T.V. This also caused there to be a generational divide.

Folklore, such as oral histories are a way for us to understand a certain aspect of an event that we might night get looking only at published papers or academic journals that focus on the facts and numbers. They tell us how people were impacted, and in this case, they are told from someone who is remembering an event 50 years ago, so it is likely remembered with a lens that includes their more current lives and experiences. As McNeil states in Farm: A Multimodal Reader, studying folklore, “is a great way to understand what’s important to a culture or group.” (Kinkead, Funda, & McNeil, 2016). History is made up of everyone, not just the famous people.

References

Interview with Elliott, Mrs. W. D. by Larry Johnson (date unknown), in the Southern Oral History Program Collection #4007, Southern Historical Collection, Wilson Library, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill

Kinkead, Joyce, Evelyn Funda, and Lynn S. McNeill. Farm: A multimodal reader. Southlake Texas, Fountainhead Press, 2016.