When Fence Lines Were Phone Lines
Lyda Hill Texas Collection of Photographs in Carol M. Highsmith’s America Project, Library of Congress, Prints and Photographs Division
One story we learned at the Legacy of the Plains Museum caught my attention so thoroughly that I think it deserves its own blog post.
The first commercial telephone company opened on January 28, 1878 in New Haven, Connecticut. It had 21 subscribers. (I wonder who they were and how they expected to use it.) The first long distance line opened six months later, connecting Springfield and Holyoke Massachusetts. By the end of 1880, there were over 49,000 telephones in the United States, but they were all located in cities (loosely defined). Early telephone companies weren’t willing or able to offer phone service in rural areas, particularly the wide open spaces of the American West.
But while it may have been difficult for a farmer or rancher in Nebraska to get phone service, beginning in 1897 anyone could buy a battery-operated telephone from the Sears Roebuck catalog. And it turned out rural areas already had existing local networks in place in the form of barbed-wire fences, which often were connected at the corners of adjacent farms. Buy the phone, attach it to your fence, and voila! Local phone service. (The addition of small glass as homemade insulators improved the service. Good for more than corn relish and pickled beets. )
The barbed wire networks were inherently local—but realistically, long distance calls were a rarity even in cities. The networks ere also were the original party line. An out-going call would ring on every phone in the network, so each farmstead adopted a distinctive Mose code-style ring tone of long and short rings. Some networks also adopted a code for a “line call” intended to reach everyone on the line when there was an urgent need to spread news—not so different from Amber alerts and severe storm warnings on modern cell phones.
At its height, the improvised fence line phone service had roughly three million users. Who knew?
Road Trip Through History: Legacy of the Plains
The first thing we saw as we drove into the parking lot of the Legacy of the Plains Museum in Gehring, Nebraska, was a half dozen Longhorn cattle that were milling around, while a man who looked nothing like a cowboy waved his arms and tried to shoo them back into their pen.
It turned out to be the perfect introduction to the museum, which turned out to be the perfect counterpoint to the Buffalo Bill Center of the West. The Center of the West described itself as being about the Wild West, and in fact focused in broad terms on cowboys and Indians. The Legacy of the Plains, previously the Ranch and Farm Museum, tells the story of settling the west from the perspective of, well, ranchers and farmers, broadly defined. And it was absolutely fascinating. We spent the better part of a day there.
The first rooms of the museum are deceptive. They look like many other local history museums, with a collection of stuff displayed with little sense of museum craft. Some of the objects had a story attached. Some were displayed with no explanation at all.* Interesting enough, but nothing special.
Then I walked across the hall and through a closed door and found myself in a different museum all together. The first room is an long darkened space where an introductory video plays continuously above a series of interactive panels that introduce themes that are developed more fully inside the main museum, which is an impressive professionally designed space with well-done audio visual displays and interactive exhibits.**
The main museum explores a lot of topics that we had seen discussed in less depth in smaller museums or on historical markers over the course of the trip. Here are the big picture themes that caught my imagination, with some smaller details:
1. The first exhibit after you enter the main hall looks at the region as a historical crossroads: Beginning with the peoples who traveled the plains during the Paleolithic period, the exhibit then looks at the development of generations of routes and roads based on well-established Native American trade routes. Fur trading routes developed into emigrant trails, such as the Oregon Trail, beginning in the 1830s.*** The railroads followed, finally reaching the North Platte Valley at the end of the century, and eliminating the older trails and trading posts in the process. Railroads in turn were challenged by the arrival of paved highways after World War II. ( My favorite quotation from this section? “Railroads made the Oregon Trail obsolete. Automobiles brought it back.” Personally, I think this theme was a very smart way to cover a lot of historical ground. So to speak.
2. Several sections of the exhibit look at the history of settlement in the area, notably homesteading and immigrant groups who settled in the region. Here are a few stories/fact-lets from these sections that caught my imagination:
- The Homestead Act of 1862 allowed single women and African-Americans to claim homesteads—and they did. This was huge.
- The first homesteader was Daniel Freeman, who reportedly claimed his 160-acre tract in Nebraska ten minutes after midnight on January 1, 1863, the day the act went into effect. (My guess is that this is comic-book history at its finest. ) The Homestead National Historical Park is located on the site of his claim.
- Freeman made history a second time thirty years later when he tried to stop the local schoolmarm from teaching the Bible in the classroom. After the school board brushed him off, Freeman took the case to court. He lost at the local level, but won when he took the case to the Nebraska Supreme Court.
- The last homesteader was Ken Deardorff, a Vietnam veteran who filed a claim for eighty acres of land in Alaska in 1974.
- Most of the immigrant groups described in the exhibits were variations on the usual suspects, but one took me by surprise: the area around Scottsbluff had a substantial population of Japanese immigrants. Beginning around 1900, Japanese came to the area to work on the railroad and then found jobs as laborers in the area’s growing sugar beet industry. By 1913, some 200 Japanese families had established themselves as sugar beet farmers in their own right. In World War II, a number of the Japanese families were able to avoid the internment camps and stay in Nebraska, sponsored by local families. (The volunteer on the desk claimed that most of them were not interned at all because they worked in an essential industry. The exhibit did not corroborate this, but I surely wish it were true.)
3. A large portion of the museum dealt with farming. Much of it focuses on farming in a semi-arid climate, which was all new two me. It discussed the differences between dry-farming and irrigation and the conflicts between farming and cattle ranching. **** (Cattle herds arrived from Texas in the 1860s, after the buffalo herds had been almost demolished. The Nebraska sand hills were rotten farmland, but they turned out to be ideal for raising cattle. ) The exhibit includes lots of examples of vintage farm equipment, with descriptions of how they work and how they changed over time. (Not just plows and harvesters, but specialized equipment like bean cutters and beet harvesters.) I must admit, my favorite part of the farm section was the interactive quizzes about farm animals, in which I demonstrated that I know a lot more about pigs than I do about sheep.
The museum also includes an 80-acre working farm, complete with those Longhorn cattle. The museum sells calves to help finance it’s programs and holds a Harvest Days festival in the fall at which visitors can see antique farm equipment in action harvesting the year’s crop and harvest potatoes from a “pick your own” patch. Big fun!
*I really wanted to know more about the non-electric portable piano from the early 1900s: a keyboard in a box, about the size of a modern electronic keyboard, with folding legs and a handle. I cannot imagine how it worked since it did not appear to have room for strings. I haven’t been able to find anything like it. And I wasn’t bright enough to take a picture.
**The volunteer at the front desk told me that they hired a museum professional from New York to design the space, but they provided the information and some sweat equity in building the exhibits. For example, a group of women created the realistic-looking sugar beets in this wagon out of styrofoam:
*** I don’t know about you, but I had no idea these westward trails were called “emigrant trails” until I saw this exhibit. I’m prepared to believe that it is a term of art since the National Park Service also uses it in its series of articles on settlers heading west.
****I spent the rest of my time in the museum with this playing in my head:
Road Trip Through History:Empire, Wyoming and Black Homesteading
This barely counts as a “road trip through history” post. It is more of a “a historical marker sends me looking for more information” post.
The historical marker gave the bare-bones account* of Empire, Wyoming—a short-lived community of Black homesteaders in Goshen County, near the Nebraska-Wyoming border. The marker ended with this sentence: “Empire remains a powerful reminder of the struggles and achievements of African Americans who migrated to the plains seeking land, education, and civil rights.” As far as I was concerned, it was more than a reminder, it was a whack up the side of the head. My mental image of homesteaders has always been populated with white faces.** As soon as we got home I went looking for more information, about Empire, Wyoming, in particular and Black homesteading in general.
Here’s my own bare-bones version:***
Empire was initially settled in 1908 by three families who were closely related by marriage. The Enlarged Homestead Act allowed each family to claim 320 acres.*** *Unlike many homesteaders, they arrived with experience with dryland farming and financial capital to invest in their new farms. Several of them had advanced degrees. Their claims became the foundation for the community of Empire, which grew to about sixty people at its peak in 1915.
Eventually ten families “proved up” homesteads. Other residents directly purchased land or did not claim land at all. By 1909, the community had a schoolhouse and had hired a young black teacher from Cheyenne. (They successfully used a Wyoming law requiring segregation in any school district with more than 15 non-white students to wrest control of their school from the local white-controlled school district.) By 1912, the town had two churches and its own post office. It looked like Empire was a success.
But the challenges of dryland farming were nothing compared to the challenges posed by the racism of white settlers in surrounding communities. The most horrific of the race-based incidents occurred in November 1913—in form that feels all too familiar—with the arrest of Baseman Taylor. Accounts vary as to the reason for his arrest, but witnesses stated that the sheriff and his deputies beat and choked Taylor repeatedly He died in custody three days later.
The community broke into factions after Taylor’s death. Residents began leaving. Some relocated only a few miles, searching for better access to water. Others moved to the larger Black settlement in Dewitty, Nebraska. By 1920, the farms had largely been abandoned. By 1930, only four Black residents remained in Goshen County and the town was gone.
Empire did not last, but other groups of Black homesteaders seized the opportunity to own land and created communities that survived. ***** Once again, it turns out that a story I thought I knew had big holes in it.
*Not a criticism. Historical markers, by their nature, always give bare-bones accounts. This one at least included a couple of photographs, a plat of survey of the homesteaded area, and an image of a homestead patent.
**Not unlike our cultural image of cowboys.
***With thanks to blackpast.org, the Wyoming State Historical Society, and the Homestead National Historical Park in Beatrice Nebraska, which is run by the National Park Service and is now on my list for a future road trip. There is no historical site for Empire itself, only two historical markers.
**** The Enlarged Homestead Act was passed in recognition of the difficulties of dryland farming in the semi-arid land of the western plains. The act expanded the number of unirrigated acres a family could claim from 160 to 320.
***** The first and most dramatic examples came in the 1870s, when more than 25,000 Black Americans, known as the Exodusters, poured into Kansas, which had a history of abolitionist sympathies and a state constitution that declared landownership was open to settlers regardless of race. This probably deserves a blog post of its own down the road. So many stories I’ve never heard.