These new appliances were all but useless to homes without electricity. The electric lightbulb, invented in 1879, transformed the urban landscape, while the 1920s ushered in a variety of electric appliances, including phonographs, vacuum cleaners, refrigerators, and radios. This difference between the farm and the city created a significant cultural division. It was simply not profitable for companies to string miles and miles of cable to service widely dispersed farms.

The main cause of this disparity was the cost of constructing power lines.

In 1935, during the Great Depression, only about 10 percent of rural Americans had access to electricity, in contrast to 90 percent of urban Americans. In 2016 forty-one individual co-ops, all members of the umbrella organization Georgia EMC, provided electricity to 157 of the state’s 159 counties, or approximately 73 percent of Georgia’s land area. Electric cooperatives (co-ops), also known as electric membership corporations (EMCs) or rural electric membership corporations (REMCs), have served Georgia’s rural regions and counties since the mid-1930s.

Little ocmulgee emc