Volume 8 , Issue 25

Telephone Service in Oklahoma...

"I just rechecked one of my books about early Perry (Oklahoma) and I may have told you this before. Perry was one of the first towns in the territory to have phone service. In 1897, John Noble and John Coulter extended the line that had been built a month after the land run in 1893.

Our first phone line had run from the Howendobler Drug Store to the train station at Wharton (a mile south of Perry) so they could know whether any freight had come in for Perry (they'd hitch up a team to a wagon and go get it as rapidly as possible this way).

The station agent at Wharton, E.E.Westervelt eventually became the Oklahoma manager of Southwestern Bell. The new phone lines were extended to a drug store in Pawnee and to the new college (Okla. A&M, now called OSU) at Stillwater, and the new company built an exchange on the north side of the square and started out with about 100 subscribers. Residential subscribers were charged $1.50 per month and business paid $2.00 a month.

In 1899 a line was extended to Guthrie and in 1900 they added a line to Enid. The company was first called the Arkansas Valley Telephone Company, then the Pioneer Telephone company and in 1919 it became the Southwestern Bell Telephone company. When they began giving out numbers for the phones, the Marland Oil distributor (later known as Conoco) had #1 and I believe that a doctor had #2. I'm not sure what number that Howendobler's Drug had but it surely was one of the first 10.

As I mentioned previously, the lumber yard where my shop is now located was phone #5. I don't think I have records before the 1920s or '30s, but most of the early numbers would still be in my files." -- Roy   |  View or Add Comments (0 Comments)   |   Receive updates ( subscribers)  |   Unsubscribe

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