When The Lights Came On with Dr. Lacy Ford

“When the Lights Came On”: A “Magic Moment” for Many Rural South Carolinians

Dr. Lacy Ford will showcase the history of the impact of rural electrification  and how rural electric cooperatives “turned on the lights” for many South Carolinians.

As late as 1930, the curse of darkness still fell heavily across most of rural South Carolina. Cities
and most towns in the state had electric lights by the 1920s, with electricity provided by investor-
owned utilities and municipal electric corporations which depended on population density to
make their efforts financially feasible. But most rural South Carolinians remained without
electricity because they lived in areas where the lack of population density rendered it
unprofitable for investor-owned utilities. It took the emergence of electric cooperatives and the
availability “public power” to bring electricity to the previously unserved areas, fulfilling a
dream shared by many rural people across the South Carolina countryside.

By the time electricity reached rural households, most country people had seen electric
lights in visits to towns and cities. But when electric power came to their own households, they
saw their own lives transformed by the convenience and comfort of electricity. 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 – in very tangible ways as the cooperatives began to deliver electricity to previously
unserved areas. As cooperative member Hubert Waldrop of Laurens declared: “It was just a
modern miracle when the lights came on.”

Without question rural electrification changed the daily routines and life experiences of rural
people repeatedly across the decades after the “lights came on” in rural South Carolina. South
Carolina’s electric cooperatives have played a major role in ushering rural South Carolina into
the modern world through making electricity available to rural people while also serving as a
center of community experience, and, at present, leading the effort to bring high-speed
broadband service to currently underserved rural households in South Carolina.

The presentation will focus rural South Carolinians recollections of how they felt and how lives
were transformed when “the lights came on” in their rural SC communities. The author will take
any questions arising to the presentation or from the larger book Empowering Communities:
How Electric Cooperatives Transformed Rural South Carolina. (USC Press, 2022).