Diverse Power Incorporated

Diverse Power Incorporated is a member-owned electric cooperative that provides reliable electric energy-related services to the Georgia Counties – Troup, Harris, Heard, Meriwether, Muscogee, Coweta, Quitman, Randolph, Clay, Calhoun and parts of Early, Stewart, Terrell. As well as Chambers County, Alabama. Formed by farmers and rural businessmen in 1936 to bring electricity to the rural countryside a thoroughly innovative idea at the time, Diverse Power continues to serve its members and communities with innovation through vision and quality through service.

Along with providing electricity to energize homes and businesses, Diverse Power further serves its members by engaging in various community initiatives aimed at improving the lives of all residents. Whether it’s by partnering with area schools to provide needed teaching materials, or joining forces with other organizations to boost community and economic development in our region, Diverse Power continuously strives to make a positive and powerful impact in all the communities through which its utility lines extend.

history

The history of Diverse Power Incorporated, a member-owned electric cooperative headquartered in LaGrange, Ga., is closely linked with the history of all the nation’s rural electric cooperatives. For it was within Diverse Power’s service territory in central west Georgia that President Franklin D. Roosevelt first became aware of the overwhelming need for affordable electric service in rural America.

Truly, Roosevelt endeared himself to Georgians. He continued his speech with the following words, which have been quoted countless times in promoting Warm Springs, the Little White House and Georgia’s EMCs:

“There was only one discordant note in that first stay of mine at Warm Springs: when the first-of-the-month bill came in for electric light for my little cottage, I found that the charge was 18 cents a kilowatt-hour about four times as much as I paid in Hyde Park, New York. That started my long study of proper public utility charges for electric current and the whole subject of getting electricity into farm homes. So, it can be said that a little cottage at Warm Springs, Georgia, was the birthplace of the Rural Electrification Administration.”

It was Roosevelt himself who linked the country’s rural electrification program to his adopted hometown of Warm Springs, Ga. In an August 11, 1938, speech at Gordon Military College in Barnesville, Roosevelt spoke at the dedication of Lamar Electric Membership Corporation (now Southern Rivers Energy). His comments there immortalized the impact the president’s connection with rural Georgia had in illuminating the nation’s farms and country back roads. “Fourteen years ago, a Democratic Yankee came to a neighboring county in your state in search of a pool of warm water wherein he might swim his way back to health,” Roosevelt said before a crowd of 20,000 that summer day. “The place, Warm Springs, was a rather dilapidated, small summer resort. His new neighbors extended to him the hand of genuine hospitality, welcomed him to their firesides and made him feel so much at home that he built himself a house, bought himself a farm, and has been coming back ever since.”

The Mountville connection

Upon hearing those words from the president, O.R. Caudle, a founder of Diverse Power, might have smiled to himself and thought: “Yes, and there we were, the future president and me, not even 20 miles away, discussing the need for electricity in the country all those years back, in front of my store that day he stopped for a cola.”

It’s an oft-told story that serves as the seed from which Diverse Power sprouted. Caudle believed that at least part of the impetus for FDR’s push for rural electricity was due to a chance encounter the two had in the 1920s.

One spring morning, a few years after opening his business, Caudle was sitting in front of his Mountville drugstore with Virgil Hardy, Douglas Williamson, Hubert Humphries, and his sister, Elizabeth Hogg.

“Everyone else was farming,” Caudle wrote in a history he prepared for the local co-op in 1969.

Enjoying the warm breeze of springtime in Georgia, the five noticed an A-model Ford top the hill, coming from LaGrange in their direction. Cars were still a novelty in the mid-1920s, and to add to the novelty, this one had a wheelchair tied to the back.

“It came to a stop in front of my store and the driver asked if he could get a Coca-Cola,” Caudle recalled. “He said he was Roosevelt from Warm Springs, Georgia, and was coming from LaGrange where he had addressed a civic club.”

A cola was retrieved for the thirsty traveler and, while Roosevelt was drinking his Coke, Virgil Hardy noticed a tire going flat on the Model-A. When Roosevelt asked if anyone there could repair the tire, the men gladly obliged.

“He opened the door of his car and put his feet out on the running board and talked with us as we fixed the tire,” Caudle wrote. “He noticed we were pumping the tire with a hand pump and asked if we had ever tried to get electricity.”

The answer was a simple, “No.”

Roosevelt must have been as bewildered at the store’s lack of electricity as the storeowner and his friends were at the sight of a wheelchair strapped to the back of the Ford. A conversation ensued, with the ambitious New Yorker telling the Southerners he thought electricity should be everywhere that it would be a good thing for the country and would eventually pay off for everyone. He remarked that it was a shame that the rural people did not have electricity and that something ought to be done about it.

Before he left, Roosevelt encouraged Caudle to contact Georgia Power Company, to inquire about extension of power lines into the rural community. Caudle did just that, but the venture was deemed cost prohibitive and the matter was dropped. In the meantime, Roosevelt’s visits to Caudle’s store in Mountville continued.

“We didn’t think anything of Mr. Roosevelt stopping by my store to get a Coca-Cola,” wrote Caudle. “He did it often.”

Those visits, however, became less frequent after Roosevelt became governor of New York and then, president of the United States. But he didn’t forget the Mountville storeowner. One day, the then-president sent Caudle special words of encouragement by way of Virgil Hardy, who had gone to Warm Springs to do carpentry work for FDR, who urged Caudle “not to give up We would get electricity yet.”

And they eventually did, about two years after Roosevelt signed the bill creating the Rural Electrification Administration (REA) on May 11, 1935.