Entergy Brand Guidelines: Harvey Couch’s Sawdust, Middle South & a 1989 Name

A 1913 utility fired by sawdust.

Entergy, the New Orleans utility group, traces its history to 1913 and to Arkansas. The Encyclopedia of Arkansas says Harvey Crowley Couch, a Columbia County native who had already built railroad and telephone businesses, founded the Arkansas Power Company that year. In 1914 he bought the power plants at Arkadelphia and Malvern and joined them with a 22-mile transmission line, then the only one in the state, which at first ran only at night. To fuel his two generators he struck a deal with H. H. Foster of the Arkansas Land and Lumber Company for its surplus sawdust, and by the end of 1914 the business had been renamed Arkansas Power and Light (AP&L). Entergy’s own history still opens with that deal: “It all started with some sawdust, a handshake and a vision.”

Couch then turned to water. Remmel Dam on the Ouachita River was completed in December 1924, creating Lake Catherine, and Carpenter Dam followed in 1931, creating Lake Hamilton outside Hot Springs, the encyclopedia says; Entergy says Remmel Dam is still in operation. By 1930 AP&L had customers in more than 60 Arkansas counties and 3,000 miles of lines. In the 1920s Couch also set up sister utilities next door: Mississippi Power and Light, formed in 1923 from four local companies, and Louisiana Power and Light, according to English Wikipedia.

EBASCO, Middle South and the nuclear years.

In New Orleans a separate line was forming. English Wikipedia says the Electric Bond and Share Company (EBASCO), then a General Electric subsidiary, merged competing streetcar and electric companies into New Orleans Public Service in 1922. Rather than compete, the two groups combined: in 1925 Couch sold part of Mississippi Power and Light to Electric Power and Light Corporation, an EBASCO subsidiary, Entergy says, and Wikipedia adds that the holding company was based in New Orleans with Couch as president. Gulf States Utilities was incorporated in Texas the same year, according to Entergy.

Federal law then broke that structure up. The Public Utility Holding Company Act of 1935 targeted multi-level holding companies such as EBASCO, which lost a Supreme Court challenge in 1938, Wikipedia says. In 1949 AP&L, Louisiana Power and Light, Mississippi Power and Light and New Orleans Public Service were brought under a new holding company, Middle South Utilities, the Encyclopedia of Arkansas says. Entergy says its shares began trading on the New York Stock Exchange on 31 May 1949; the headquarters sat in New York until it moved to New Orleans in 1975.

Nuclear power arrived in the 1970s. Arkansas Nuclear One Unit 1, near Russellville, was completed in December 1974 and a second unit followed less than six years later, the encyclopedia says; Entergy calls Unit 1 the first nuclear plant to operate in the Southeast. In 1984 AP&L was drawn into what became known as the “Grand Gulf affair,” a dispute over its share of construction costs for the Grand Gulf nuclear station in Mississippi, which the encyclopedia says became a major public controversy in Arkansas.

Utilities and their public face.

Investor-owned electric utilities in the United States sell something nobody sees. Their customers meet them through a bill, a meter, a truck in the street and, when the lights go out, a crew working overnight. So the pictures these companies choose carry much of the weight that a product shot would carry for a maker of goods.

The most familiar picture is the lineworker. Annual reports and storm-season posts return again and again to crews in bucket trucks against heavy skies, to rows of trucks staged before a hurricane, and to poles and wires being rebuilt. Next to them sit transmission towers at sunset, substations, and long views of solar farms and wind turbines, often shown beside older gas, coal, hydro and nuclear plants.

The second register is the customer relationship. Utilities explain smart meters, outage maps and mobile apps for reporting a fault or paying a bill; they print bill inserts on saving energy and send branded customer-service vans to local events. Community-giving photography, from school grants to volunteer days, is a staple of their websites. Trade gatherings such as the Edison Electric Institute’s meetings and the DistribuTECH conference are where they speak to one another and to suppliers.

This guide sets out what can be checked about each company — when and where it began, which utilities it owns, how its name changed and what its public record shows — and marks clearly what rests only on the company’s own word. The palettes and type here are our own interpretation, not the companies’ marks.

Enterprise, energy and synergy.

In 1989 Middle South Utilities became Entergy Corporation, and AP&L became Entergy Arkansas, the Encyclopedia of Arkansas says. Entergy explains the name as a blend of “enterprise,” “energy” and “synergy.” Before the change each subsidiary had its own logo, Wikipedia says, and a single Entergy logo replaced them. Gulf States Utilities of Beaumont, Texas, joined in a merger that the encyclopedia and Entergy date to 1993 and Wikipedia to 1 January 1994. Today the group serves about 3 million utility customers in Arkansas, Louisiana, Mississippi and Texas, the company says.

The decades since brought expansion and retreat. Late-1990s ventures abroad, in countries including Australia, Argentina and the United Kingdom, were unwound from 1998, Wikipedia says. From 1999 Entergy bought nuclear plants beyond its home region — among them Pilgrim in Massachusetts, Indian Point in New York, Vermont Yankee and Palisades in Michigan — and later sold or closed them; the company says the sale of Palisades to Holtec International in June 2022 completed its exit from the merchant nuclear business. Hurricane Katrina in August 2005 left 1.1 million Entergy customers without power and moved the headquarters to Clinton, Mississippi, for nine months, Entergy says.

On 7 February 2022 Entergy unveiled a new corporate brand and a refreshed logo, the first change to the mark in more than 30 years, the company said. Its announcement spoke of “vibrant colors” reflecting the “rich textures of our Gulf South home,” and said the new look would roll out over several months to outdoor signage, fleet vehicles and bucket trucks.

For a design guide, Entergy shows how a holding-company name chosen in 1989 replaced a family of separate state logos, and how a refresh three decades later kept the name while changing the look. Compare Southern Company, another utility holding company in the South, and Duke Energy. For this guide we use a deep teal, a soft cream and a warm coral with a serif, an unofficial interpretation; no product or logo is reproduced.

Keep Entergy’s identity on hand — save it to a board in the Made Good inspiration library.