Most analyses of electrification focus upon the national technical, financial, and political challenges that stood in the way of an electrically modernized society, such as Jay Brigham's Empowering the West. The national debate on electrification centered on watercourses that could support hydroelectric power sites and curtailing monopolistic private companies. In areas where navigable rivers are scarce and potential customers are dispersed, such as Kansas, the electrification battle was more localized and regional. These local and regional movements for electrification applied a wide range of solutions to the problems electrification posed for the smaller and more dispersed populations of rural Kansas. The larger municipal companies of the early 1900s provide standards against which we can rate the different solutions used in Kansas. With the passage of the Rural Electrification Act in 1936 Washington politics and authority were brought into rural Kansas and permanently changed the face of local electrification movements by defining goals and objectives for new rural cooperatives in the state. .
Despite the assumption that rural electrification began with formation of the Rural Electrification Authority (REA) in 1936, electricity had already reached the forefront of national politics. Efforts were being made by individuals and groups to supply electricity to rural Kansas well before the passage of the REA. One such effort was the Berwick Transmission Line Company, which was issued its corporate charter July 23, 1919. The Berwick Company was issued a fifty year charter "to build and maintain an Electric Transmission Line from Sabetha, Kansas, via. Berwick, Kansas, to its stockholders, for the purpose of furnishing light and power to its stockholders."" The uniqueness of the Berwick Company is that they were incorporated and operated outside the jurisdiction of the REA until their corporate charter was technically revoked in 1969 for failure to file a timely corporate report with the Kansas Corporation Commission.
