[Nimitz14]

Interesting perspective. I guess even in very rural areas it would have pushed people to build villages. On the other hand people already were living far apart and lack of electricity meant they had to do massively more work. LBJ's biography has a section on this, explaining that life on west texas farms was incredibly hard without electricity (and as congressman LBJ worked very hard to expand that to rural people).

[ghaff]

It sort of has. Lots of people you think of as living in fairly rural locations are still in small towns rather than the middle of nowhere.