Supporting History

No Phony Business: Preserving Telephone History in Cheyenne Wells

Originally published in Colorado History NOW, August 2004

On Colorado’s eastern plains, especially in Cheyenne County near the Kansas border, the earth and sky meet at a line that seems to go on forever.  To those traveling through the area from heavily populated regions, this great emptiness is unique and pleasing.  To residents, the emptiness can mean isolation.  As one local citizen said, “It is not unusual to drive a hundred miles just to visit friends or family on a Sunday afternoon.” One might ask, why not just pick up the telephone and call? Today, with cell phones and microwave transmissions, this task is easy enough; in the 1920s driving might have been quicker.

At that time, telegraphs connected train depots in high-plains towns along the Missouri Pacific and Santa Fe Railroads, but many of the farms and homesteads located away from a main highway still lacked instant communication.  And those lucky enough to have telephone service relied upon switchboard operators—who may or may not be at their posts, depending on the time of day—to connect their calls.

In April 1927 the Mountain States Telephone and Telegraph Company purchased the Cheyenne County Telephone Company.  Seven months later the business opened a new building in Cheyenne Wells. This modest brick structure represented a big change for the community: 161 telephone lines were brought in and the operator was now available twenty-four hours a day!

For a brief time, the Mountain States Telephone and Telegraph Building enjoyed a stint as the technological center of the modern telephone world.  Following World War II, the Bell System had been struggling to provide service to remote areas because of shortages of copper wire and qualified installers.  In August 1946, the company experimented with the nation’s first radio-telephone technology as a way to provide communication service to a few rural farmers in the Cheyenne Wells area without running any new lines.  The success of this short-wave radio solution provided the know-how to install other systems in Utah, Idaho, and Montana.

Mountain Bell sold the historically significant Telephone Building to the town of Cheyenne Wells in 1968.  The structure served as a library from 1969 to 1996, but was unoccupied until recently. Now, the Eastern Colorado Historical Society and Cheyenne County are moving ahead with plans to turn the building into a museum that will celebrate its importance to the area and to the development of rural communication.  The museum will interpret the 1920s with an original phone booth, switchboard, and other artifacts.

The State Historical Fund is helping preservationists restore the building.  Drawing on suggestions made by an SHF-funded Historic Structure Assessment, grant work is underway that will address exterior components such as the roof, flashing, windows, and doors.  Another grant will help repair and restore interior finishes, woodwork, and doors.

Today, ceramic tile letters still spell out “TELEPHONE” on a band running between rows of decorative brickwork along the building’s façade.  While party lines and operator-assisted calls have been replaced by cellular phones and speed dialing, the efforts of Cheyenne County, the Eastern Colorado Historical Society, and numerous dedicated volunteers are going a long way towards preserving a bit of local technological history. And when the museum opens for business, don’t call.  Drive out and investigate it, and the eastern plains, for yourself.

BY LYLE MILLER, Technical Advisor, State Historical Fund

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