On the Monday after Thanksgiving in 1938 a group of Riverton businessmen and farmers decided to collective bring electricity to Fremont County.
A group of nine men gathered upstairs at the Masonic Temple Building to begin the process of creating an electric co-op.
Led by E.W. “Jim” Beckman, fellow members were Emory M. Miller, Charles A. Davison, Marvin E. Williams, W.R. Forbes, Ernest Lindholm, Ralph Adams, Adam Addison and H.E. Rookey.
Beckman, often referred to as “Colonel” in deference to his work as one of the premier auctioneers in Central Wyoming took charge of the meeting in attorney Don Spiker’s office.
The group had spent the previous weeks after harvest surveying neighbors on the possibility of creating an electric cooperative under the auspices of Roosevelt’s New Deal REA programs. There were already several cooperatives up and running around Wyoming and it was time for rural Fremont County to join the rest of America in the 20th century.
Beckman was elected chairman by a unanimous vote and the meeting began.
They named the cooperative the Riverton Valley Electric Association. The purpose of the organization was stated in their corporation papers.
To generate, manufacture, purchase, acquire and accumulate electric energy for its members only and to transmit, distribute, furnish, sell and dispose of such electric energy to its members only.
To Assist its members to wire their premises and install therein electrical and plumbing appliances.
To borrow money…for the objects or purposes of the Corporation.
Many of the other cooperatives operated on a profit basis, RVEA did not. Their incorporation papers stated…”The RVEA was formed without any purpose of direct gain to itself…any person, corporation or body politic may become a member in the Corporation by paying the membership fee…and agreeing to purchase from the Corporation electric energy…”
Spiker copied an incorporation template provided by the REA almost word for word and submitted the application to the Wyoming Secretary of State Lester C. Hunt and the REA was born.
Electricity was the “talk of the town.” It came up in discussions at Grange meetings, school board meetings, town councils, county commissioner’s meetings, bank board meetings, and especially at fair board, and stockman’s association meetings. All were in favor of bringing inexpensive electricity at a shared cost to farms, ranches and communities across the Wind River Basin.
Salena Reid was hired as the first office manager, beginning her 37-year tenure with the RVEA early in 1939.
“When I arrived, we had a desk and one second-hand adding machine,” Trembley said in a 1989 interview. She was paid $50 per month.
Reid was the daughter of Lost Cabin rancher Bill Reid and grew up there and later at the family ranch near Arapahoe. She graduated from Riverton High School and began her professional career as a secretary for Riverton School Superintendent Helen Petersdorf.
In 1942, she married Hugh Trembley.
The national movement for rural electrification came on the efforts of one young engineer. Morris Cook was from a wealthy Philadelphia family, but he quickly saw the need for electricity in rural America. Private power companies had a stranglehold on electricity distribution and their onerous business practices gouged the consumer. Cook estimated that he could deliver electricity through cooperatives to farms across the nation for $300 to $1500 less than the power companies offered.
He met hostile opposition from the corporate power companies, but the 1929 crash of the New York Stock Exchange put many of them out of business, and he found a willing ear in President Roosevelt in a 1934 meeting in the Oval Office.
Cook’s research indicated that only 800,000 of the estimated 5,000,000 farms in America had electric power in 1934. FDR and the New Deal quickly changed that. With the signing of Executive Order 7037 the REA became a reality.
But it still required approval by the United States Senate and the opposition by the Republican minority was fierce.
Here is an excerpt from dialogue between Republican congressman Schuyler Merritt of Connecticut and Democratic congressman John Rankin of Mississippi:
RVEA memberships were five dollars, a stiff price for many post-Depression era farmers. Some balked at it, and the RVEA just bypassed their farm, moving on to the next one. The RVEA had 100 members signed when word arrived that Senator O’Mahoney had secured a $103,000 loan to be paid over 25 years from the REA. This money was enough to build 91 miles of power lines near Riverton but required 236 signed members to begin construction.
A problem came with the creation of a rival co-op near Pavillion. The Midvale Light and Power Corporation incorporated and filed a request for funding just a few weeks after the RVEA. The Midvale group had more farmers willing to sign on in Missouri Valley, Paradise Valley and Hidden Valley but they were wider apart and would require many more miles of lines, and hundreds more power poles.
The REA knew that the Pilot Butte Power Plant was the only source of power for both groups and that construction costs would be prohibitive if two rival co-ops were established adjacent to each other.
On February 4, 1939, the Midvale Light and Power Corporation Board drew up a consolidation proposal. The RVEA rejected it since the newly combined board would have more Midvale members than Riverton members. Even though Midvale had more paying members, petty jealousies sank the consolidation.
The REA would have none of it. They told both groups that if they didn’t consolidate, they would deny the funds and end the project.
That’s all it took, the boards combined with Midvale area farmers holding a slight majority.
Six RVEA directors resigned. Davison, Williams Forbis, Lindholm, Adams and Rookey all left the board and were replaced by H.L Littlefield, Curtis Neil, Nonie Sollars, Kenneth Evans, W.E. McGrath and Oma Wilson. Beckman remained chairman.
At the end of March, word arrived that the REW had allocated $155,000 to build 128 miles of line for service to at least 414 customers.
A final roadblock, this one between the Bureau of Reclamation and the REA in faraway Washington, D.C. stalled the project again. The Bureau of Reclamation operated the Pilot Butte Powerplant and they wanted more money per kilowatt-hour than the RVEA wanted to contract it for.
Local Bureau of Rec representative H.D. Comstock was disliked by area farmers. Comstock looked down on Fremont County farmers and openly said they would never be able to pay for much less build the grid for the project.
The sentiment was mutual.
Gid Davison shared Comstock’s message in a 1989 interview, “People in the Bureau felt that the Riverton project was a lemon. They felt it should never have been started. Everyone who worked for the bureau got a chill when the Riverton project was mentioned. If someone was hated in the bureau, that’s where they sent them, Riverton.”
The RVEA let the feds have their feud and started construction.
They purchased a 1939 Chevy pick-up truck from Rhodes Chevrolet for $633 and rented a second floor office in the Masonic Temple building for $10 a month.
The RVEA asked for bids and Donovan Construction Company of St. Paul, Minnesota won the bid at $83,428.69. The work was to be complete 75 days after construction began.
A cold winter, with temperatures dipping to 44 below zero slowed construction, but the poles were all set before the cold weather arrived. On January 7, 1940, RVEA’s Lud Landmichl threw the switch and power arrived at 130 farms.
The reaction among area farmers was ecstatic. Mary Schamber, who farmed with her husband Erhardt about three miles directly south of Pavillion stated the excitement well. “Our kids were so excited,” Mary said. “One would turn on the switch and the next would say, now it’s my turn.”
Erhardt related how electricity changed rural life. “To use the outdoor toilet when the temperatures were way below zero was no fun. Bathing before electricity meant using a swash tub near the stove in the kitchen. In winter, chairs were set up to support blankets to hold in the heat from the stove. If the water was too hot from the stove you cooled it down with cold water and hurried to bathe before it got too cold. A warm bathroom, a big tub and at toilet with running water were a dream come true.”
An unexpected consequence of the arrival of rural electricity was a boom in dairy farming. Milking cows was an arduous process when a dairyman had to milk cows by hand, usually twice a day, then process the milk in hand cranked separators. An electric milking machine was invented by a dairy farmer in New Zealand in 1917. It caught on around the world.
Fremont County eventually sported over 60 dairy farms and had creameries in Riverton, Lander, Shoshoni and Hudson, all thanks to the arrival of electric powered milking innovations.
The inventory on the project was impressive, 1.5 million feet of transmission wire, 50,000 feet of covered wire between transformers and meters, 2,100 poles and 250 distribution transformers.
The power left Pilot Butte at 33,000 volts and was reduced to 6,900 then to 220 or 110 for each customer.
In 1951, the RVEA purchased the Dubois Service Company and the following year, the new Boysen Dam was completed on December 11, 1952, bringing more power into the grid.
Another memorable event came in July,1952, with the hiring of Janice Anderson. Janice began a career which spans over half the lifetime of the RVEA. She retired in December of 1993, after 41 years.
“The biggest change has been the billing system,” Janice said. “When we started, we wrote the bills by hand. By the time I finished, they were all on the computer.”
She was working when the RVEA office moved to South Fifth Street directly behind the Riverton Ranger.
“We only had two rooms, and a warehouse,” Janice said. “We started sending bills by teletype to Mandan, North Dakota to be processed.”
She recalled the process of dividing the “territory” for electrical service between Pacific Power and Light (PP&L) and RVEA.
“They were bigger and could charge less,” Janice said. “The Public Service Commission finally came in and divided it.”
Janice was familiar with PP&L, which sprang from Mountain States Power before eventually becoming the modern Rocky Mountain Power.
“I worked for Mountain States for four years after graduating from high school,” Janice said. “When I worked at Mountain States, every night the power would flicker and go out at 5:30 because everyone came home at the same time and turned on the lights. We kept candles in the office so we could close in the dark.”
Some years stand out more than others. In 1982, Janice was appointed manager after a month’s long, nationwide search. The following year, the winter of 1983-84 was one of the worst on record and a challenge for the newly appointed manager.
“The transformers would blow when people turned on too many appliances,” Janice said. “When there was an outage, we had a standby list for the men to come in and work. It was 20 to 30 below zero and the guys would have to go out until the power came back on.”
A tragedy struck the RVEA with the electrocution of lineman Johnny Bohan. “The line wasn’t disconnected and he was killed,” Janice said.
In the early years, thunderstorms were a constant threat to delivering electricity.
“Lighting would hit the poles and blow up the transformers,” Janice said. “We solved the problem but it led to a debate on whether it was better to have above ground or below ground electric lines.”
Janice looked forward to going to work each day. “I enjoyed my job,” she said. “I enjoyed working and they were a good company to work for.”
Soon after taking the job as manager in September 1982, a storm rolled into the Wind River Basin.
“It was a big snowstorm. It was awful,” Janice said. “Lines were knocked down and no one had any power. People were without power for days, some for weeks. The snow was deep and our trucks were getting stuck. Farmers came out with their equipment to pull out the trucks.”
There were some humorous incidents over the years.
“We had a tree trimming service to help prevent outages. One lady, out near the Owl Creek Campground refused to let us trim her trees,” Janice said. “There was a storm and she was blocked inside her house by fallen limbs. She called the office to get the guys to come out and trim her trees. We did, after a while.”
Sometimes disgruntled customers took the RVEA to small claims court if the power went out.
“In 1982 there was a power outage in Lander, they were out for several days. A guy took us to small claims court because the meat in his freezer had spoiled. Our attorney was Don White,” Janice said. “We went to court and the guys suing us were standing there, but so were several Wyoming Game and Fish officers. The guys pulled out spoiled wild game as evidence that the power outage had ruined the meat in their freezer. The Game and Fish officers waited until the case was over and arrested them outside the courtroom for poaching.”
When she retired, the RVEA sent her and her husband on a trip to Hawaii as a reward for four decades of dedicated service.
Working in the field while Janice manned the office all those years, was lineman George Burns. George started his RVEA career in 1949 with a short two-year break to serve in the United States Army from 1950 to 1952.
George spent much of his career in Dubois, working out of the RVEA office in the High Country for a little over 28 years before moving back to his birthplace in Riverton to finish out his career.
George was a lineman, and responsible for many miles of lines throughout Fremont County. One of his first jobs was building the line to Trout Creek above Ft. Washakie.
“The digger we had wouldn’t dig rock very well, so they would drop us off in the morning with a digging set and a bar,” George said in 1989. “Some days it would take all day to dig a hole five feet deep.”
From Trout Creek he built lines on 8 Mile Road, 17 Mile Road, Missouri Valley Road and Hidden Valley. He built and maintained the lines from North Portal to Pavillion as well.
In 1950 the RVEA purchased the Dubois Electric Company from Don Purdum. George was given the assignment to survey the new purchase.
“It turned out to be a long job,” George said. “We had to walk and measure all the lines from five miles west of Dubois to Diversion Dam.”
In 1952, a service connection call came for Boysen Peak. It was two miles almost straight up from the nearest section house.
“We hauled material to the top of the peak then carried poles, wire, and a jack hammer, all hand work,” George said. “We would walk to the bottom each day where we were picked up. It took about three weeks to do the job. This was one of the toughest jobs we did.”
Not as tough, but much more frightening was a winter trip back to the top of Boysen Peak.
“We had a jumper wire break off on the transformer. It was in January, about 40 below zero in Riverton. We hired Tim Coleman to fly me up to the peak as the North Road was closed,” George said. “When we landed near the top of the Boysen Peak everything was going good until we hit a drifted place and the plane ended up on its propeller. Tim got out and pushed the plane back up so I could get out. By that time, I was pretty shook up. Tim radioed for a new propeller. I repaired the transformer. I decided I would rather walk off the mountain, so I did. Tim and I laughed later about it. He said I was the only one he ever took for a ride that walked back.”
In 1998, the RVEA and the Hot Springs Rural Electric Association merged to form High Plains Power. At present High Plains serves 13,000 meters in nine central Wyoming counties.
A second power company, Rocky Mountain Power originated in Utah but has expanded to Wyoming and Idaho where they serve 1.2 million customers, including the town of Riverton and nearby properties.