Near Hampton, Iowa, the Reeve Electric Association Plant played an important role in the early spread of electricity to rural America. In the mid-1930s, when only about 10 percent of the nation’s rural homes and farms had power, local farmers organized to extend electric lines and secure federal financing. The plant became the first farmer-owned power plant in the United States to receive a Rural Electrification Administration grant in 1937, and the second to begin operating in 1938. Using four diesel-driven generators, it served farms that private utilities had largely bypassed. Later preserved as a museum, it remains a rare surviving example of cooperative rural electrification.