Our roots go back to the 1930's when this part of North Carolina was a sparsely populated farming area. This was the in the midst of the Great Depression when jobs were few and times were tough. Electric and telephone service did not exist in most of the area now served by Yadkin Valley Telephone. These services were available in the towns and cities, but the suppliers would not extend lines into rural areas where they saw no possibility of earning a profit. At this time, President Franklin Roosevelt, the U.S. Congress, and our state legislature were hard at work developing social programs designed to get people back to work and return the country to prosperity. One such program was the Rural Electrification Act. This piece of New Deal legislation created a new federal agency, the Rural Electrification Administration, which provided low interest loans and technical assistance to rural electric cooperatives to bring electricity to the farms. It was this program that brought electric service to the area during the 1930's and 1940's.
