The Livingston Telephone Company

Duane's take

Here's my telling of what the official marker has to say about the Livingston Telephone Company, right there in Polk County. Now settle in, because this is a story about connection, and how a handful of folks in East Texas decided they weren't going to wait on the rest of the world to catch up to them. On August 3rd, 1903, the Livingston Telephone Company was organized.

S.H. Smith stepped in as president, and Polk County had itself a public utility. The oldest one it's ever had, as a matter of fact.

Now, they set up their switchboard on the second floor of a building at 315 North Jackson, and somebody sat up there around the clock, twenty-four hours a day, keeping the lines of Livingston humming. That's the kind of commitment that deserves a little acknowledgment. They started with forty telephones.

Forty. Hand-cranked, every one of them. You wanted to reach somebody, you gave that crank a good turn and hoped the person on the other end was of a mind to pick up.

But the people of Polk County took to it. They took to it something fierce. By 1909, when the company put in those creosoted poles, the system had grown to a hundred and twenty-four telephones in service.

From forty to a hundred and twenty-four. That's not a telephone company stumbling along. That's one finding its stride.

The decades rolled on, as decades tend to do, and in 1959 the exchange was converted to a fully automatic dialing system. No more operator perched up on that second floor at all hours. The wires did the work now.

Polk County's oldest public utility had carried its people from a hand-cranked box on the wall all the way into the modern age, and it did it on its own terms, locally owned and independent from the start. Some things in Texas are just built to last.

What the marker says

Polk County's oldest public utility, the Livingston Telephone Company was organized Aug. 3, 1903, with S.H. Smith as president. The locally owned, independent telephone exchange operated a 24-hour switchboard on the second floor of a building at 315 N. Jackson. the system started with 40 hand-cranked telephones in service. By the time creosoted poles were installed in 1909, there were 124 telephones in use. In 1959 the exchange was converted to a fully automatic dialing system. (1985)