Living history
Explore your co-op, past and present
DIAMOND CAVERNS. Sheltowee Trace. Churchill Downs.
History is alive in so many places across our state, and this month’s travel guide encourages you to time travel through the Bluegrass. You can visit the Perryville Battlefield State Historic Site and take a moment to remember the sacrifices as the Union and Confederate armies clashed years ago, or maybe you’ll walk through the Bill Monroe Homeplace and imagine the beginnings of Bluegrass as music notes would have floated out the windows.
There are so many places in Kentucky you can visit to learn about the heritage of this great state—and I would suggest that your local cooperative is one of them.
After President Franklin D. Roosevelt signed the Rural Electrification Act in May 1936, farmers in rural America, including here in Kentucky, could get access to low-cost loans to bring electricity to the farm.
In 1937, Henderson Union became the first electric cooperative to distribute power in Kentucky. These days, that cooperative is called Kenergy—it merged with Green River Electric in 1999.
Today, Kentucky is home to 24 distribution cooperatives, who serve 1.8 million consumer-members. We’ve made a lot of progress in the last nine decades, but to paraphrase Robert Frost: we have miles to go before we sleep.
The cooperative mission means bringing you safe and reliable electricity. When either of those tenets are threatened, we advocate for you and speak up on your behalf. Electric cooperatives face a pivotal moment in history. As energy demand from data centers, AI and beyond stresses the grid, we must work to make sure we are as innovative and prepared as our predecessors.
We are proud of our history, but we must look forward. However, we know we can tackle the challenges up ahead because our history represents just how far we’ve already come.
