If there is one thing I’ve learned in the past 12 months, it’s that as a general population, we love electricity.

On Christmas Eve, December 1940, my family homestead farmhouse experienced the glow of artificial light for the first time. My Great-Uncle John wrote me a Christmas greeting and included a story about the first time they had power in the house. I read the letter the same day that we received our satellite internet for the farm in the mail, Christmas Eve, December 2021. The farmhouse, built in the 1920’s, has been home to now the 4th generation of the family lineage. I love reading stories from Uncle John. He was in the first group of kids to grow up on the farm, with my grandpa Alvin who was born in the little bedroom off the living room. When my Great-grandparents established the farm, it was a dairy operation. Great-Grandpa was a dairy farmer and maybe surprisingly to some, a pioneering advocate for electrifying the countryside.

By 1930 it was estimated that about 80% of American households had electricity. Not the case in rural Northern Alpena and Southern Presque Isle Counties. If you’re familiar with a dairy operation, or really any operation that we rely on today that uses automated systems for efficiency, you can imagine the incredible gap between the toil and sweat of working without power assist for anything, and working with the convenience of electrification. What happens on a farm when electricity is introduced? Water pumps. Coolers for milk storage in stead of blocks of ice kept in straw and sawdust in an adjacent barn. Light after dark extending the working and animal caretaking hours. A plug-in wringer washer instead of a washboard. An indoor electric “ice box.” Light for school work and sewing.

To us in this modern era it sounds nostalgic, bucolic, so far away in a bygone era. When I was younger I learned how important the passionate work of my Great-Grandpa Barney was to the current livelihood of the region. His work, and the work of many others involved in rural electrification, accomplished an incredible feat of societal evolution.

From a commemorative newsletter from Presque Isle Electric & Gas, ‘Presque Isle Electric was the first cooperative in Michigan to build an REA-financed power line. This was only possible because of the actions taken by President Franklin D. Roosevelt… On May 11, 1935, President Roosevelt signed Executive Order 7037, establishing the Rural Electrification Administration or “REA”, which provided low-interest government loans to build electric systems based on the cooperative business model, one that farmers had been familiar with for years. Before the REA, only people who lived in the city or were on a main road could get electric service…While some saw the new “electric” as a Christmas present, the men who had spent countless days and nights in meetings, driving hundreds of miles on dirt roads to reach the next farmhouse, knew what an REA employee in Washington said was true: “The best project in the United States is no bed of roses.” A myriad of problems and obstacles confronted the electric co-op pioneers, starting with the skeptics who wouldn’t sign a membership and those who didn’t want to grant a right-of-way for fear of losing their property to the government…Electricity to the rural farms changed everything. It was a revolution in rural living.’

One of those men putting miles on the dirt roads, talking to skeptical farmers and rural residents across the region was Great-Grandpa Barney. He traveled to Washington D.C. to testify on the critical importance of bringing infrastructure to the rural areas of the nation. In 1964 he was President of the Presque Isle Electric Board. I remember him as a hard-working man wearing overalls, giving me candy from his secret stash when Grandma wasn’t looking. He was a visionary, an early adopter of new technology and the efficiency benefits and economic opportunity it provided.

In Spring of 2025, that same farmhouse lost power for about 10 days. Smaller outages have happened since then. During our March 2026 ice storm Presque Isle Electric & Gas didn’t experience the same level of outages as 2025. Our generator was ready regardless. We love electricity. I thought about Great-Grandpa a lot during the first and second ice storms, and any other time I do something on the farm that needs power. How much work went into making it happen in the 1930s & 40s, and now we are incapacitated without it.

People. I learned there is no way I could have kept any kind of farming operation going during those 10 days of off-grid living from the ice storm. My Grandma was without for almost a month. We used candles at night and could barely see a thing. How do you wake up on time without an alarm clock? If I had to go milk cows twice per day with no milker pumps, carry buckets of milk to a cold house for storage, carry water from a hand pump to however many dozens cattle would have been on the farm – I would probably faint. Showering after spending hours in the barn cleaning up? Not an option. Of course, I’m just one person in her late 40’s now. This farm has, at times, been shelter for more than a dozen family members at a time so there were always hands to help regardless of electricity. However, the opportunities that opened up for the generations after the home received electricity changed the trajectory and strength of the family tree.

As we again recover from devastating ice storms and power outages, I’m reminded of the long bridge we wandered across to get here. In the beginning, people weren’t sure about this new technology or the government’s involvement. Now we use an app to report outages. From candle-light to finding a way to charge an iphone, times may have changed but one thing has not. Northeastern Lower Michigan is an example of what innovation looks like where it matters most, in small communities like ours where new technology is sometimes out of reach without herculean efforts to advocate on behalf of residents.