DUANE
Duane's take
Here's how the official marker tells it, and I'm gonna let it breathe a little. This is the story of the Odessa Telephone Exchange, out in Ector County. It began operation about 1897, with a woman named Edna Fielding working as the central — that's the operator, the living, breathing switchboard who connected one voice to another across the West Texas dust.
Miss Fielding held that post until her death in 1902. After she passed, a Baptist minister by the name of Rev. G.
B. Ely purchased the exchange. Now there's a calling within a calling for you.
Then in 1911, a pioneer rancher named A. Quincy Cooper bought the system, and Cooper had ideas. He extended service out to the rural areas — and here's where it gets good — utilizing barbed wire fences as telephone lines.
That's right. The same wire keeping cattle in was carrying voices across the range. Cooper worked that system himself, out there checking repairs on a barbed wire line on January 25th, 1915.
And on that particular day, on that particular stretch of fence, A. Quincy Cooper interrupted the first transcontinental telephone call — Alexander Graham Bell himself, speaking from New York, connected to his assistant out in San Francisco. The biggest telephone moment in American history, and a rancher in Ector County was somewhere in the middle of it, messing with the wire.
You can't write that. The marker didn't have to. In 1928, the exchange became part of the Southwestern Bell Telephone Company, folded into something bigger, the way things go.
But before it did, it gave us Edna Fielding, a preacher with a switchboard, a rancher with a fence full of voices, and one accidental brush with history that still rings out across the plains.
What the marker says
Began operation about 1897, with Edna Fielding as "central" (operator). After Miss Fielding's death in 1902, the Rev. G. B. Ely, a baptist minister, purchased the exchange. Pioneer rancher A. Quincy Cooper bought the system in 1911, and extended service to rural areas, utilizing barbed wire fences as telephone lines. While checking his repairs on a barbed wire line on Jan. 25, 1915, Cooper interrupted the first transcontinental telephone call between Alexander Graham Bell in New York and his assistant in San Francisco. In 1928, the exchange became part of the southwestern bell telephone company.