This community is near the entrance to Cape Cod and very likely was one of many towns in SE Mass. and Cape Cod served by the Southern Massachusetts Telephone Company. Judging by the interesting non-Bell, non-uniform style of line construction here, I'm pretty sure this line was built by the So. Mass. Tel. Co.

One-by-one commencing around 1900 New England Telephone & Telegraph Co. bought So. Mass. Tel. exchanges until the latter was fully absorbed by them in 1938.

Upon such purchases line construction was eventually "upgraded" to standard Bell openwire construction. The first thing to go were CD 102 and 106 insulators and that included many So. Mass. Tel. Co. marked ones, making the latter very difficult to find. Other than most being thrown away, a few made their way onto a few private phone lines here in southeastern MA. This includes some that were found along a municipal phone line route near where this picture was taken for water flow dispatching.

As a kid I went through hoards of revoved insulators from NET&T and looked at lots of glass around my community and I recall no CD 102, 104 nor 106 ponies, so Ma Bell was pretty thorough getting their phone openwire to Bell specs. The NET&T openwire I recall were subscriber leads along side streets. The replacement crossarms were 10-pinners (all were creosoted) with galvanized wire and generally were mixtures of CD 115, 121, 154 insulators.

By early 1967 most openwire phone leads around my hometown (Brockton, MA which is about 30 miles SE of Boston) were removed. It was sad to see that stuff go, but it surely was fun going through the pile of removed insulators at the company's boneyard for this young enthusiast ;-)