Recent historical work suggests the need to reassess the importance of imagination in the expansion of large technical systems, beyond the initial phase of social appropriation of radically new technologies. This paper discusses the role of imagination in the expansion of electricity networks in rural areas of the US and France. It argues that the strong and lasting public support for rural electrification did not stand to reason. Rather, it rested on the 'modernizing imaginaire'? of elected officials and social modernizers who assumed both that there was a strong connection between rural electrification and electrical agriculture, and that electrification could check rural emigration.