Rural Electrification
Administration Era
The federal program that transformed American farm life — and the era that gives the Stadum family archive its deepest institutional roots, through Palmer's work at Baker Electric.
The federal program, 1936
In 1936, 90% of American farms had no electricity. The Rural Electrification Administration, created by executive order in 1935 and codified by the Rural Electrification Act of 1936, set out to change that — not by building power lines itself, but by providing low-interest loans to rural cooperatives that would.
The REA's approach was deliberately decentralized. Federal money, local implementation. Baker Electric Cooperative in Benson County was one of thousands of local cooperatives that took REA loans, hired linemen, and wired the surrounding countryside farm by farm.
What it meant on the ground
For a farm family in North Dakota in 1937, electrification wasn't an abstraction. It meant electric light instead of kerosene, electric pumps instead of hand-pumped water, refrigeration, a radio, and eventually a washing machine. The change in daily labor — especially for women — was substantial.
Palmer Stadum was part of the crew that made those changes physical. He set poles, strung wire, and connected service drops to farmsteads that had never been on the grid. Benson County's farms were electrified line by line, and Palmer was on many of those lines.
Forty years later — 1975
In 1975, the REA's 40th anniversary was marked at the Rugby Pioneer Village with a ceremony recognizing the founding generation of cooperative workers. Palmer attended and was formally acknowledged.
The ceremony is documented in the family archive through photographs and in Rodney Stadum's 2019 oral history, where he describes Palmer's reaction — a man not accustomed to being formally recognized, moved by the occasion and the crowd that had gathered to mark the era.
Why this era matters to the archive
The REA era is the Stadum archive's deepest institutional root. It connects Palmer's personal story to a national policy history, ties the family to a specific geography (Benson County's farm country), and explains why Rugby Pioneer Village — not a university library or government archive — is the right custodian of the family's physical records.
The archive that Beverly donated in 2023 went to Rugby because Rugby was where the work happened, and the Pioneer Village was built specifically to hold the material culture of that era.