Pedernales Electric Co-op

The Rural Electrification Administration would not serve the Hill Country because of an arithmetic rule: it wanted three families per mile of line, and the country between Johnson City and Fredericksburg had nothing like that. Lyndon Johnson, elected to Congress in a special election in April 1937 at the age of twenty eight, got an audience with Franklin Roosevelt and had the density requirement eased. Representatives of Blanco, Burnet, Gillespie, Hays and Llano counties signed the papers incorporating the Pedernales Electric Cooperative on 19 May 1938, electing Hugo Weinheimer of Stonewall its first president, and Mason and Kendall counties joined in June. The co-op puts that signing in Austin; the Handbook of Texas has them meeting at Johnson City. Signing up cost a five dollar membership fee, collected farm by farm and not refundable.

The rancher Babe Smith canvassed the district with Johnson to persuade farmers to pay it. With roughly three thousand families committed, the REA granted 1,332,000 dollars in September 1938 for 1,718 miles of line, the largest allotment it had ever made. Power began flowing in the autumn of 1939 through a substation at Bertram, and meter number one went on Babe Smith's own ranch.

It was the largest cooperative in the REA system within six months, and stayed so at least through the 1980s. It now carries more than four hundred thousand accounts across twenty four counties, and says of itself that it serves more meters than any other electric cooperative in the country. Johnson's own summary, which the co-op quotes undated: of everything he had done, nothing satisfied him like bringing power to the Hill Country.