The founding works: no factory stood here — the works were lines, poles, and a cooperative

ITEM 2 · 1935–1938 AND AFTER

The checklist's founding-works pattern — a streetlight or electrical factory, an anchor firm's local plant — tests negative on this ground, and the works that actually founded its electrical age are carried here at their true size: no electrical-goods factory, lamp works, or anchor manufacturer's plant has ever been seated inside the CDP in any record reached; the banked businesses leg's making-layer verdict stands undisturbed (no plant of scale, ever). What brought electricity to Harris and Clay townships was not a works but a statute and a cooperative. Indiana's Rural Electric Membership Corporation Act, signed by Governor Paul V. McNutt on March 9, 1935 — the first act of its kind in the nation, two months before the federal Rural Electrification Administration existed — let farm communities build their own distribution systems where investor-owned utilities would not. Marshall County REMC, organized at Plymouth (incorporated May 19, 1936; REA loan of $185,000 received November 10, 1936; first pole set September 30, 1937; first customer, Roy Jacoby, energized April 30, 1938; 25 miles of line and 50 members in its first year), serves members in St. Joseph County among its six counties to this day — the cooperative is the nearest thing this ground has to a founding electrical works, a member-owned line-building enterprise whose crews, not a factory, were the technology's local form. The investor-owned side of the territory completes the frame at pointer size: the county's cities and their adjoining ground were Indiana Michigan Power and NIPSCO territory, and the IURC's service-territory record is the settler for the exact township-by-township division between cooperative and company lines on this ground — GAP-84-2a, named here rather than guessed, with the commission's territory maps as the source. The streetlights of the checklist's pattern never came at all in the municipal form: an unincorporated place has no street-lighting district of the city kind, and the corridor lighting that exists arrived with the county's road program, undated in the records reached.

Sources:

1. Marshall County REMC, "Who We Are" (marshallremc.com) — service to members in St. Joseph County among six counties; the June 14, 1935 Plymouth meeting; incorporation May 19, 1936; the $185,000 REA loan of November 10, 1936; first pole September 30, 1937; first customer energized April 30, 1938.
2. Harrison REMC and Indiana Connection (Indiana Electric Cooperatives) — the Indiana REMC Act signed March 9, 1935, first in the nation; the federal REA by executive order May 11, 1935.
3. Banked Businesses — the making-layer verdict (no plant of scale seated in the CDP), followed here.