Titus County, Texas History - Telephone Service in Titus County

Early Long Distance Telephone Call in the News - (Photo MS-0008)

We don't know the date or name of the newspaper where this article was published because the date and paper's name have been clipped, which is rather common with news clippings from people's scrapbooks. In the early days of telephone service, long distance was quite a novelty. Before the telephone, the only way to correspond with people in distant cities was to visit them, to write them (and mail could take days or week to arrive depending on the distance), or to telegraph them, which was fast but expensive and not private.

Being able to actually hear someone's voice from a distance city was quite a novelty. We suspect that this article was published in the very early 1900's, as long distance lines are said to have first come through Titus County in about 1899.

To date, we have not found early documentation of when telephones first came to Mt. Pleasant in government records, and microfilmed news articles begin in latter 1923, long after they arrived here.

According to R. L. Jurney, the long distance lines first reached Mt. Pleasant in 1899.

I.W. (Dutch) Greenspun, who was of German-Jewish descent, came to Mt. Pleasant near the turn of the century as a walking peddler. According to Mr. Jurney, prominent Mt. Pleasant businessman J. M. Badt felt sorry the peddler and wanted to help him, so Mr. Badt gave Greenspun a lot of age-yellowed, shopworn lace from his store. Greenspun bleached and pressed the lace, and later called on Mrs. Badt at Badt's home. She purchased a lot of the beautiful lace, and when J. M. came home for lunch, showed him the bargain she purchased from Mr. Greenspun.

Greenspun liked Mt. Pleasant and decided to stay here. He must have been quite a businessman, because within a few years he had accumulated considerable property and was associated with several businesses.

On September 27, 1902, Dutch Greenspun established Mt. Pleasant's first local telephone exchange and installed a two position switchboard on the second floor of one of his buildings. The Greenspun building was located on the northeast corner of the intersection of what are now East Third Street and North Jefferson.

A switchboard, or more accurately a plug board, was located in the central office. The switchboard was simply a large cabinet that contained rows of 1/4" jacks connected to local numbers and another row of 1/4" male plugs on flexible cables that were also connected to local numbers.

In order to make a call, you simply turned the crank on the telephone, which lit an indicator on the central office switchboard. When the operator saw the light come on, she would come on the line and ask who you wanted to speak to. When you told her, she would plug the 1/4" plug on the flexible cable into the jack corresponding to your number on the panel to connect the call.

Long distance calls were handled by different operators at a separate set of consoles. For long distance calls, the local long distance operator would dial a long distance operator in another town, who rang the desired local number in that town. When the party came on the line, she would ask them to hold for long distance and would then connect the long distance circuit to the local circuit by plugging in the corresponding wire so the two parties could talk.

In 1903 Greenspun sold the telephone exchange to Charles Werner. Greenspun later moved to Ft. Worth, where he made a sizable fortune in the candy business.

Charles Werner operated the local telephone exchange until January 26, 1904, when he sold it to the Southwestern Telephone Company. Southwestern Telephone Company was the forerunner of Southwestern Bell Telephone, SBC Communications, and the current incarnation of AT&T which is not the same corporation as existed from the latter 1800s until the 1970s before telephones were de-regulated.

Traylor Russell states in his book that Morgan and Booker Tennison, Jr. also purchased and operated the telephone exchange for a few years, but we do not know the time line of when they may have done so. It is possible we can resolve this in future updates.

As far as we can determine, the telephone exchange remained in the Greenspun building at East Third and North Jefferson until latter 1936.

Telephone numbers and operations were simple during this time period. Telephone customers were merely numbered 1, 2, 3, etc., which was the telephone number. The telephone was a rather large wooden box, measuring approximately 18" tall by 10" wide that hung on the wall. It contained a microphone that was permanently mounted to the box and a removable speaker or earpiece that was connected to the box by a flexible cotton-covered cord. A hand crank was located on the right side of the box.

When the call was finished, the operators on each end unplugged the cord to disconnect the circuit and end the call, making the circuit available to another caller. As the town grew, central office telephone operations required many ladies to sit at many switchboards to handle both local and long distance calls.

Through the years, Southwestern Bell and it successors have usually provided Mt. Pleasant with good to high quality telephone service when compared to service available in other towns in this area.

In October, 1928, the Mt. Pleasant City Council met with telephone company representatives to ask for a reduction in local telephone rates. However, when the Council investigated prices and service in other towns, they found that Mt. Pleasant was getting as good if not better service at no additional cost. The telephone company also told them that they were preparing to spend several thousand dollars to upgrade their service and reconstruct much of its local system, but had delayed the upgrade when the City requested a rate reduction. The Council withdrew their request, and the upgrade continued as previously planned.

The telephone company, by then named the Southwestern Bell Telephone Company, leased the entire second floor of the Caldwell Building above the Safeway store. The Caldwell building once sat near the northeast corner of the square facing North Jefferson Street, but was demolished and in 2008 the location is a parking lot.

J.E. Hawley, Western Electric foreman, assisted by H.C. Smith and F.J. Eldridge of Western Electric and W.J. Minor of the local telephone company installed a new $15,000 state of the art central office which featured a carrier system to increase the number of long distance circuits to Paris, Texarkana and Dallas. The new carrier system central office was more advanced than those found in cities much larger than Mt. Pleasant at the time.

The new carrier system required no additional wires to add additional circuits because it placed several voice channels at different frequencies on the same wire to allow more long distance conversations to be carried simultaneously. The new equipment included two Class C systems, which added six talking circuits, and one Class D system that added two additional circuits, one 130 volt power plant, and one 24 volt power plant, besides the miscellaneous equipment necessary for the system. The carrier system also allowed existing circuits into Mt. Pleasant to be divided into intermediate points along the long lines from Dallas and Texarkana that were already present.

Business was so brisk that the telephone company couldn't keep up with installation orders. On December 1, 1937, local plant superintendent W. J. Minor added a new permanent installer and a temporary installation helper so they could install new phones faster to keep up with orders.

Early telephone directories (like early newspaper ads) do not contain street addresses. Street addresses were added in the January, 1938 edition of the Mt. Pleasant telephone directory at the Chamber of Commerce's request.

Wildcatters struck oil in Talco in February, 1936, which changed the entire county's infrastructure. A large throng of people quickly swarmed Titus County with dreams, realistic or otherwise, of striking it rich in the oil boom. Titus County was not equipped to handle so many people in such a short time span. The existing telephone system was over-loaded by the large number of calls taking place related to the oil business, as well as the increase in calls made by our new residents. As a result, the telephone company had to quickly upgrade and modernize its switch and central office by adding new circuits and all-new modern equipment.

and particularly in rural areas, several neighbors shared the same telephone line, known as a "party line."

The family telephone was often installed on a custom-built shelf in the hallway so that it was convenient to everyone in the household. The telephone shelf either had its own light, as this one did, or was placed below a ceiling light so users could read the directory easily and could make notes during a call if necessary. The telephone sat on the shelf, and a directory and writing pad and pencil were kept below it.

Extension phones had to be rented from the telephone company and could not be bought in stores. As prices for telephone service dropped, and particularly after telephones were de-regulated by the government, extension phones in other rooms became more common and shelves like this one were no longer built into new homes.