Tillmore, WI c.1910, Rural Crooked Telephone Line

By Joe Maurath, Jr.; posted November 1, 2013
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Definitely not up to Ma Bell Standards, folks.

Lines like this were erected by small Ma-and-Pa phone companies that were springing up all over the country soon after the invention of the telephone. Operating with limited capital a lot of these phone companies sometimes used surplus-purchased stock for line-building which often provided for a wide variety of insulators discovered upon such lines that were still in service when insulator collectors came around in the 1960s.

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