Seventy-five years ago, Wake Electric Membership Corporation was hardly more than a hope in the minds of a handful of area residents. They wanted electric service at a price they could afford. Since that time, we have grown from 317 members to 39,000 members in Durham, Franklin, Granville, Johnston, Nash, Vance and Wake counties. We did not initially serve Nash and Johnston counties.
Before 1940, a small group of progressive Wake County farmers living in the Wake Forest school district had tried many times to get the local power company to extend its lines into their communities, but they were told there were not enough farmers who would use the service to make line extensions profitable.
E.T. Kearns Jr., an agriculture teacher at Wake Forest High School, called a meeting on Ground Hog Day in 1940. He invited farmers in the Wake Forest area interested in getting electric service to their homes, businesses and churches. A small group of 40 people attended and listened attentively as Mr. Kearns shared the story of how farmers in Davidson County, where he had formerly been a resident, had organized an electric cooperative when they could not get electricity from any other source.
Among the first interested group was School Superintendent Randolph Benton; Russell Wiggins, then local post master and a farmer (he was elected the first president of Wake Electric) and Dr. Thurman Kitchen, president of Wake Forest College, who observed, “Here is a college over one hundred years old, yet we look around the college community and see kerosene lamps almost to the city limits of the town.” Less than one farm in four at that time had electricity.
These pioneers divided up the territory, each of them taking responsibility for an area. They rode down each road, asking farmers to sign membership applications and pay the $5 membership fee – which many of them really didn’t have, for few farmers at that time had recovered from the Great Depression. Meetings were held in rural churches and schools, around potbellied stoves in country stores and in some homes, all to tell the story of cooperative electrification if an average of three farmers per mile would sign up for electric service.
A total of 317 farmers finally signed applications by April 1940 and the Wake Electric Membership Corporation was chartered by the State of North Carolina on April 22, 1940.
The first official meeting of the Board of Directors was held two days later in the Wake Forest High School library, officers were elected and bylaws were adopted. By December of the following year, 1941, over 500 families had the brightest Christmas in their lifetime. And the rest is, as they say, history.
