1909 Local Telephone Story

From a 1909 issue of the Fort Payne Journal.  The beginning of local telephone service with independent lines which were to be connected to Southern Bell lines in Fort Payne. In the early days AT&T/Bell installed lines in the larger towns like Fort Payne while the rural communities would have to install their own telephone lines through local cooperatives. Early projects like this were the beginning of Farmers Telephone Coop. 

Remembering Party Line Phones

In today's age of smartphones that do everything from making a phone call to playing video games and watching videos it is difficult to imagine that in some cases it wasn't that long ago that shared party line telephony was common.

I was born in 1970 and for the first ten years of my life my family was on a party-line system. In fact it wasn't until 1981 that every phone in the Rainsville Exchange had been converted to a single line system.

Like the internet today party line telephones in their life span became a way to spy on your neighbors and listening to other people's telephone calls became a local sport.

Most of the United States had converted to the single line system by the 1960s but here on Sand Mountain the old party line held sway for another generation or to put it in perspective my family was finally rid of the party line three years before the first cellular telephone network went online.

The next time you pick up your iPhone or Android put it into perspective and remember that not so long ago we were picking up the receiver of a Western Electric 500 and hoping that no one else was already on the line.