An organizational meeting of the Planters Electric Membership Corporation was held in the Bellevue Plantation commissary building on August 5, 1936. Those present and elected as officers were Porter W. Carswell as president, Frank M. Cates as vice-president, Joel Chappell as secretary-treasurer, and John Reese. The Planters Electric Membership Corporation was officially incorporated on November 12, 1936, becoming the third cooperative formed in Georgia and only the seventeenth in the United States.