State of the Commons

Abstract

"One year after that meeting, the Reeve Electric Association became the first farmer-owned cooperative to receive a loan for the purchase and distribution of electric power from the Rural Electrification Administration, a centerpiece of Franklin Roosevelt’s first term. In four years, the number of electrified farms in the United States more than doubled, from 789,000 in 1936 to 1.7 million in 1940. To my knowledge, this is the only online photo of the Reeve Plant that is freely available to publish. It was uploaded to Wikipedia in September by Ann Sullivan-Larson, a graphic designer at a print shop in Iowa, and tagged with a creative commons license that allows others to share and remix the image. Although the plant was listed on the National Register of Historic Places in 1990, the National Park Service has yet to digitize its photographs of the building."