Mt Holly Springs Telephone Exchange

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Historic exchange building.

This will amaze some who know what CO buildings generally look like but this was the telephone exchange building in 1956.  Both of my older sisters worked here as telephone operators for a few years after they graduated in 1954 and 5.   I am not sure what year the dial replaced the operators but it was before I graduated from High School in 1961.  This exchange handled both regular phones and Magneto phones.  The Magneto phones are the ones which you saw on Mayberry and Petticoat Junction TV shows.  We actually had a magneto phone for over five years in the home where I grew up.  The last magneto phones in the US were phased out in the early 1970’s.  The board is in the Bell Museum in Springfield IL, set up with a mannequin in period dress.   It was actually more primitive than the boards in Mt. Holly Springs.  This exchange was different from Mt. Holly in one way, all the lines on it were magneto and it was operated by a small company that had only that exchange.   Mt. Holly was operated by United Telephone (Embarque for this month) and provided exchance support for the area.

For the regular phones the caller lifted the receiver, a light came on the board and the operator plugged into it.  On the magneto lines the light lit when they cranked the phone.  Our number was 906R11 that meant we were on line 906 which we shared with about 25 other parties.  There were really not 900 lines, the magnetos were all 900 series and they were grouped on one row on the board.  The 11 after the R in the number meant a call for us had one long and one short ring.  Moose’s store was 906R41, four longs and one short.

We heard the rings for everyone who got a call.  Imagine the privacy nuts going bananas if that happened today.  We were just about five miles from the exchange.  That was ten miles of number 18 copper wire per line and two insulators on a crossbar every five hundred or so feet.  That is ten poles a mile or fifty poles and 100 insulators for each line.   If the number of wires exceeded ten, or five lines the second crossbar was needed on every pole.  The crossbars were nearly six feet.  Fifty of them make quite a pile of lumber.  So everyone in an area was on one line to keep the line costs down.  We didn’t have an option when we got the first phone unless we wanted to pay the construction cost for a line to be run the full five miles.  The wire for that today would easily cost $1500 and the insulators another $500.  Labor today would be easily $10,000.   We would be looking at $1500 for the line at best, about a quarter of the price of some homes in the area at that time.  The 906 line actually covered two side roads from Route 94 Victory Church Road and Smith Road.  They added together another three miles of wire.