By the end of 1919, Ohio Farm Bureau’s board of directors decided to hire a full time
person to run the organization’s daily operations. They picked Murray Danforth Lincoln,
a Cuyahoga County banker, in February 1920. His seemingly endless stream of ideas
would shape the federation for more than a generation.
Murray Lincoln was born in 1892 on a small Massachusetts farm. In 1914, fresh out of
agricultural college, he began his career as a county agent in New England. Lincoln
went to work immediately urging farmers to organize associations to produce their own
fertilizer and market their own milk.
Lincoln believed that cooperatives represented something that prevents the average
man from being smothered between Big Business and Big Government. Once he was
hired as the first executive secretary of the Ohio Farm Bureau Federation, he led the
organization into a variety of cooperative enterprises, from grain elevators and farm
credit to auto insurance.
As an agent of change for farmers’ lives, Lincoln’s most significant undertaking was
helping to launch the electric cooperative movement in Ohio. The private, investor-
owned utility companies of the time (1935) refused to extend service into sparsely
populated farm country, stating that it wasn’t cost-effective.
Murray Lincoln and the Farm Bureau offered to set up rural electric cooperatives, which
unleashed a battle with the private utilities that the coops eventually won, after political
gamesmanship and wild tactics that Lincoln seemed to relish. Despite all the drama,
Lincoln and his farm partners established more than 20 cooperatives within months.
In 1942 Farm Bureau passed the control over to a new, independent organization, Ohio
Rural Electric Cooperatives, Inc. Today, 25 electric cooperatives serve more than
400,000 homes and businesses in 77 of Ohio’s 88 counties.
Murray Lincoln believed that the rural electric cooperatives were among the most
dramatic demonstration of the power of the cooperative concept that this country has
ever seen.
Needless to say, Murray Lincoln (and the Ohio Farm Bureau Federation) was a force to
be reckoned with!
Information gathered from: Our Century Together and OHIO COOPERATIVE LIVING magazine.