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To conserve funds, the span lengths were longer, which meant there were fewer poles per mile than in urban centers. To protect the cables from strong winds and icing, they were reinforced with steel. Initially, a mile of rural line cost $2,000 to construct, but this soon dropped to about $600, in part because the work became more efficient. Lines were strung by waves of crews: one mapped out the project, another dug holes, another erected poles, another played out the line, and so on. You can see the linemen in old photos—in the back of a truck squatting among rolls of wire, harnessed to towering poles, and walking alongside horses drawing poles. And because rural people had been waiting for decades for something they felt had been denied them, they often thought of the linemen as heroic. One account notes, "Construction crews ... have dug post holes in ground frozen 3 feet down. They have set poles when the snow was waist deep." Another reports, "An Indiana woman lay dying of pneumonia in her farmhouse. The doctor said that an oxygen tent might save her, but there was no electricity in the house to operate the tent fan. Three linemen, working in a driving rainstorm, built a 500-foot extension in just two hours. The switch was turned on and the woman's life was saved." One legendary crew outside Kansas City, Missouri, was known as "the Four Horsemen of the Lines." The poles themselves—slender, usually with just one crossarm—were called "liberty poles."

The utilities quickly understood that they had underestimated the needs and desires of many rural communities, and in an effort to subvert the success of the co-ops, some attempted to skim the most lucrative customers—those living nearest towns and those who were most prosperous—for themselves. Just prior to co-op lines going in, a regional power company would put up poles—even in the middle of the night—to siphon off these customers. Spite lines, they were called, or snake lines, for they almost never ran straight but crisscrossed an area. One REA cooperative specialist recalled: "In Virginia, a co-op engineered a line north through the wilderness, ending in a prosperous dairy section near Chancellorsville. When construction was about to start, the power company built a short line out of Chancellorsville to serve a handful of the large-consumption dairies on which the co-op had counted to makes its 40 miles of line feasible." Such tactics, of which there are more than two hundred recorded cases, could weaken a co-op's effectiveness and ruin its chances to prosper.

By the time electricity came to the country, light bulbs were brighter, washing machines more efficient, and irons more streamlined. Farm people who could afford it bought multiple appliances before their homes were even hooked up to power, or they got appliances secondhand from city friends, so unlike in the early years, many experienced the full gamut of electricity all at once. Their kitchens, no longer cluttered with gray zinc tubs and pails, with washboards and wood stoves, were bright with white enamel stoves, refrigerators, and washing machines. Their homes were filled with little whirs, buzzes, and hums. One woman, about two years after she was married, recalled:

I had gotten these beautiful wedding presents. An electric coffee maker, an electric toaster, and there they sat.... So the day the electric came in, I sat at my kitchen table. The electric coffee pot was plugged in, the toaster was plugged in, a bare light bulb hung above, and I sat there and waited.... And such a thrill, you have no idea. I had polished all my oil lamp globes. They were sitting in a nice neat little row. Never again would I have to polish those sooty old things. Never again would I have to fill the tank on them, never again would I have to trim the wicks. They sat there and I was glad.

Those who'd had battery-run radios before line electricity had had to mete out the listening time: "We had a large battery-powered