Conroe Telephone Exchange

Duane's take

Here's my telling of what the official marker has to say about the Conroe Telephone Exchange. Now, before the age of smartphones, before the internet, before any of that, somebody had to string a wire and hope for the best. And in Conroe, Texas, that's exactly what happened.

A long distance telephone line ran all the way from Houston to Gilbert's Drug Store right here in Conroe. A drug store. That's where the future arrived.

And it was Mr. Gilbert himself, along with a man named Albert Madeley, who looked at that line coming into their store in 1899 and thought, well, why stop there? They started a local telephone exchange right inside the shop.

You could pick up a remedy for what ailed you and maybe ring up a neighbor while you were at it. Then, not long after that, a man named George Madeley, and pay attention here because the Madeleys are a family worth keeping track of, purchased the exchange. He gave it a proper name: the Conroe Communication Company.

And he ran it out of the Madeley Building, right on this very site. George Madeley held onto that operation for decades. By 1929, though, he sold the company to the owners of the Lufkin Telephone Exchange.

And here is where you get a little peek behind the curtain of how a telephone exchange actually worked back then. At the time of that sale, the Conroe exchange had a six-position switchboard. Six positions.

Staffed by two toll operators, one rural operator, and three local operators. Six people, more or less, connecting the whole of Conroe to the world. Fast forward to the late 1940s, and the office had gotten too small for the equipment it housed, equipment that was already going out of date.

Something had to give. In 1954, a dial system was installed in a brand new exchange building. No more operators reaching across that six-position board for every single call.

The dial had arrived. And the story didn't end there. In 1985, the whole operation was reorganized into the Lufkin-Conroe Telephone Exchange, Inc.

What started as a wire running into a drug store on a Conroe street corner grew, changed hands, changed buildings, changed technology, and kept right on connecting people. That's a long conversation that started in 1899.

What the marker says

A long distance telephone line ran from Houston to Gilbert's Drug Store in Conroe before Mr. Gilbert and Albert Madeley began a local telephone exchange in the store in 1899. Soon after, George Madeley purchased the exchange, naming it Conroe Communication Company. He operated the company from the Madeley Building on this site. In 1929 George Madeley sold the company to the owners of the Lufkin Telephone Exchange. At that time the Conroe exchange consisted of a six-position switchboard with two toll operators, one rural operator and three local operators. By the late 1940s the office was too small for the outdated equipment it housed. In 1954 a dial system was installed in a new exchange building. The system was reorganized into the Lufkin-Conroe Telephone Exchange, Inc., in 1985. (2000)