You’re probably reading this at home, where we’ve all been spending a lot of time lately. Seeing family and friends has become a rarity, and that can leave us feeling lonely. Thankfully, our telephones help keep us connected, and perhaps it’s more than a coincidence that just before the coronavirus hit, I’d been researching the history of Fulton’s telephone service. Here’s what I found out, starting with a little history of my family’s telephone.

My earliest memory of a telephone was the one that hung in our family kitchen. This was the early 1960s, and our family home, situated on a country road, had phone service through what was called a party line. I’m not sure sharing a telephone wire with half a dozen neighbors should have been called a party, but that’s how it worked.

Phone calls back then were limited to whatever business my parents had: scheduling a doctor’s appointment, figuring out carpool needs, checking on our grandmother’s health. The phone wasn’t used for chitchat because our neighbors would be setting up similar appointments. In my family, having a telephone was considered our good fortune, but here in Fulton, we owe thanks to a man named Le Roy Owens.

In her essay “A Telephone Pioneer,” Fulton historian Grace Lynch credited Owens as the person who “was in charge of the construction of the Oswego County Independent Telephone system,” she noted, “and served many years as its manager.”

Owens was born in Utica, New York, and though his first job involved “electrifying a railroad between Little Falls and Utica,” he turned his attention to telephones when he went to work for Bell. His job expanded beyond Utica, and while he was building toll lines in Upstate New York, he met M.S. Powell, who Lynch described as a promoter.

“Powell [would] size up situations with money-making prospects and organizing companies. [He] sought out Mr. Owens and offered him a job building a telephone system in Fulton. Never having heard of such a place, he thought Powell was talking about the Fulton chain of Adirondack lakes and asked how the promoter expected to make any money in that remote mountain area.”

Powell corrected Owens’ misconception, describing Fulton in 1906 as an “up and coming manufacturing city between Syracuse and Oswego with a population of about 12,000.” There were already two telephone companies—Bell and Rochester Telephone—with franchises to operate in Fulton, but they were barely in use. In fact, a single switchboard handled all toll calls. It was staffed by two women, Nell Brannan and Kitty Smith, and Lynch quoted Smith as remembering that “in the periods when no calls came in, Miss Brannan, who was an accomplished seamstress, taught me to sew.”

Nevertheless, Powell combined the two companies and convinced Owens to join him in expanding Fulton’s telephone service. Owens took the advice of businessman Louis W. Emerick, who suggested he open the company in a new building that would have a bank on its ground floor. Owens agreed and installed switchboards three flights up.

Over the years, a number of Fulton women worked those switchboards, and through the Fulton Library’s Memoir Project, two of their stories have been preserved. When Mary Meyer was 16 years old, she started working for the Oswego County Telephone Company. It was 1941 and here’s how Mary remembered her new job:

“The first time I saw the switchboard with the blinking lights I wondered what I had gotten myself into. But after sitting next to one of the operators—there were five of us on per shift—and watching, and then having her explain, I got my own head set and plugged it in. When a call came, a light would come on the switchboard and I plugged in the first jack to that light. Then I plugged the second jack into the number they were calling.”

Jerry Hogan Kasperek recalled joining the phone company a little later in its history, “when they were getting ready to go to the dial tone. This was a whole new era and it was exciting. People would call up and ask for a telephone and I could tell them yes after they’d waited for years and years. Previous to that, it was hard to get a telephone because they only had limited amounts of poles and lines.”

Erecting those towering poles, which we now take for granted, was a major accomplishment in the telephone industry. “No telephone poles were set on the streets in the downtown area,” Grace Lynch noted. “A pole in back of the office on the river bank took care of the buildings along the west side of [South] First Street. Another planted inside the ‘Dizzy Block’ supplied wires to the stores around it, while another pole back of the Clark House [Fulton’s major hotel] took care of that area.”

Beyond downtown Fulton, setting poles was an even bigger challenge. For that, Owens relied on Anthony Dean, who operated a farm on the East River Road. “He had a horse and a cutter,” Lynch explained. “He would take Mr. Owens from farmer to farmer, bargaining for poles from their woodlots. Farmers would cut, trim and peel the trees and haul them to Fulton with teams and bobsleds.”

Pole by pole, Owens built the telephone system that still serves Fulton and the surrounding area. By the time he died, in 1970, Lynch noted that “Owens was being heralded as a man who enjoyed the liking and respect of everyone who ever had the good fortune to work with him.”

Of course, by then, most people had traded their party lines for a private line. Gone are the days when my family waited our turn to make a phone call. The next time we speed dial a friend as if it were second nature, let’s pause and remember Le Roy Owens, who got the whole conversation started.