DUANE
Duane's take
Here's what the official marker has to say, and I'll tell it to you straight — with maybe just a little relish along the way. Dallas and the art of talkin' across great distances — now there's a story worth telling. It didn't happen all at once.
It came in waves, each one faster and farther-reaching than the last. The first wave rolled in back in 1872, when telegraph lines arrived in Dallas riding right alongside the Houston and Central Texas Railroad. One day you're waiting weeks for word from the outside world, and the next — well, the next you've got a wire humming with news.
That was the telegraph, and Dallas was finally on the line. Then came the telephone. 1878. And this first line wasn't exactly coast to coast — it ran from the city's water supply out at Browder Springs all the way to the firehouse sitting at Harwood and Main.
Practical as Texas itself. You need to reach the firehouse, you reach the firehouse. But twenty years on, things had gotten considerably more ambitious.
Southwestern Telegraph and Telephone Company built a building right here on this very site — out in what was then called East Dallas — to house what they called a toll relay office. Every toll call going in or out of Dallas passed through this facility. Every single one.
This was the switchboard between Dallas and the wider world, and it hummed with the weight of that responsibility. But progress doesn't slow down for a good building. By 1905, the old toll building was taken out of service.
The city had grown, the calls had multiplied, and a larger space became necessary. Just like that, the telephone had gone from a wire between a spring and a firehouse to something so woven into Dallas life it couldn't be contained in one modest relay office anymore. That's how fast it happened.
Thirty-three years — from the first telegraph line to a city that couldn't imagine itself without the telephone.
What the marker says
Rapid long distance communications came to Dallas in 1872 when the first telegraph lines arrived with the Houston & Central Texas Railroad. The first telephone line in Dallas ran from the city's water supply at Browder Springs to the firehouse at Harwood and Main in 1878. Twenty years later, Southwestern Telegraph and Telephone Company erected a building on this site, in what was then the city of East Dallas, to house a toll relay office. All toll calls were switched through at this facility, linking the city with the wider world. By 1905 the "toll building" was taken out of service as a larger space became necessary and the telephone quickly became an integral part of communications in Dallas. (1998)