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HISTORICAL INFORMATION
The Virginia Electric and Power Company, now known as Dominion Virginia Power, comprises approximately 250 subsidiary companies which were purchased or merged into the company over its 220 year existence. For the purposes of this description, Virginia Electric and Power Company will be shortened to its acronym and pseudonym "VEPCO." The company became known as the Virginia Electric and Power Company in 1925 when its two principal subsidiaries, the Spotsylvania Power Company of Fredericksburg and the Virginia Railway and Power Company, merged. To facilitate description, "VEPCO" will be used to describe the company both before and after this merger.
In 1787, the Virginia General Assembly established the Appomattox Trustees, a corporation whose original purpose was clearing, improving and extending the navigation along the Appomattox River so that rum and tobacco might be hauled into the Virginia highlands from the Tidewater and Hampton Roads. Since the founding of this corporation, more than 250 subsidiary companies founded for various and sundry enterprises as water power, real estate, horse shoe manufacturing, ice making, coal mining, laundry, railway and trolley service, ferry service and street lighting have joined the corporate ancestry of VEPCO. Like the Appomattox Trustees the earliest subsidiaries of VEPCO generally organized to focus on the development of canals and water power in Virginia. By the mid-19th century, however, the arrival of passenger railways and electricity, especially in urban areas, had displaced water travel and power as the focus of VEPCO subsidiary companies. Many VEPCO subsidiaries flourished during the late 19th and early 20th century after the appearance of urban electrical streetcars.
On 29 June 1909, the Virginia Railway and Power Company was incorporated to acquire three of the largest rail companies in Richmond. This was the corporate birthday and the real beginning of the Virginia Electric and Power Company. During the 1910's the company operated streetcars in four cities under complex and inflexible franchises. After World War I streetcar fares failed to adjust to meet increased cost demand. In the early 1920's city, state and national government and courts were asked to take charge of the crisis. Ultimately the Virginia State Corporation Commission took jurisdiction over public transportation and electrical companies, but failed to address the fare issue. As a result by the mid-1920's, streetcar and electrical companies had shifted their business pendulum to focus principally on the distribution of electrical power. For the next three quarters of a century, this power company continued to consolidate smaller companies and increase the size of its power grid throughout Virginia and Northern North Carolina.
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