When Alexander Graham Bell said, “Mr. Watson, Come here, I want to see you” into an early version of the telephone, it wouldn’t be heard in Garrett County, Maryland, until 1900.
William A. Smith of Hoyes built the first telephone line in the county between the general stores in Sang Run and Hoyes. This allowed callers to speak with one another, but only in those two locations.
“This is considered remarkable when one realizes Bell secured his Patent in 1876, the A. T. & T. company was formed in 1884 and 16 years later when the Bell had hardly gotten out of New Haven, Connecticut, we find a telephone line constructed and operating so far away from the field of the then telephone activity,” W. Russell Pancake, engineer assistant with the C & P Telephone Company told the Oakland Rotary Club in 1952.
Smith quickly realized the popularity of the telephone as he watched people flock to the store to use it. He also realized its time-saving qualities and the good that it could bring in connecting communities. He joined with M. Mattingly of Hoyes, Joseph H. McCrobie of Oakland, C. V. Guard of Friendsville, William Miller of Accident, and J. N. Durst of New Germany to form the Garrett County Telephone Company.
They placed their first switchboard in the A. D. Naylor store where Paul Naylor was one of the early operators. The benefit of having a switchboard was that it allowed any subscriber on the system could be connected to any other subscriber unlike the original line that only allowed the subscribers on either end of the line to communicate.
The company began stringing phone lines across the county, but also across county and state lines to connect Garrett County with the world. The Garrett County Telephone Company went into Lonaconing in Allegany County, and Mount Storm, Elk Garden, Davis, Thomas, Terra Alta, and Cranesville, West Virginia.
One of the places in the county that the Garrett County Telephone Company didn’t reach was Kitzmiller, but the residents there got their phone service in 1906. A phone company based across the Potomac River in Blaine, W.Va., was established in 1906. R. A. Smith Coal and Coke Company in Blaine was the first subscriber on the system, but on the Maryland side, three subscribers were connected in 1906. These were the Browning residence, the First National Bank, and the Blaine Mercantile Company, all in Kitzmiller.
The C & P Telephone Company started in Oakland on July 31, 1906. The company took over the phone service in Oakland including the 95 subscribers on the Garrett County Telephone Company. The first C & P switchboard was a one-position magneto switch that was installed at 58 Second Street over the Harned Drug Store.
Phones on a magneto switch are phones initially required the caller to use a hand crank to create a charge that signaled other phones on the party line that it was in use and also the operator at the local exchange.
Dr. Henry McComas, who had an office in the same building as C & P, was the first subscriber to the system outside of the subscribers that C & P took over from Garrett County Telephone Company.
C & P also took over the telephone company in Blaine and its 34 subscribers in 1920. When the takeover was made, the subscribers were also switched over to rotary dial telephones, although the phone system did not allow for direct dialing.
“If you would ask the average individual when dial telephones came into use, you would probably get the answer of the 1920’s, for that is when they became general over the United States,” Pancake said. “Yet machine switching, as we call it, is as old as the telephone itself.”
They based the rotary dial telephones on the Strowger Switch invented in 1889 and as Pancake noted, their use in telephones started replacing magneto phones in a large scale beginning in the 1920’s.
Unable to keep up with the changes and maintenance required for a telephone company and its shrinking subscriber base, the Garrett County Telephone Company closed in 1922. The remaining 42 subscribers were transferred to C & P.
From then one, C & P was the telephone company that serviced Garrett County and instituted improvements in telephone communications.
You might also enjoy these posts: