The folks in Bryant Pond, Maine apparently don't change to modern technology without good reason. For instance, the small town of about 1,300 people in western Maine was the last municipality in the United States to switch from a hand-crank telephone exchange to a dial system. Even better, the townsfolk seem to miss the dear old hand-crank phones so much that some of them erected a statue in honor of the old-fashioned phones!
(Click on any of these small images to see a larger picture.)
In 1981, the local telephone company, operating from a two-position magneto switchboard in the living room of owners Barbara and Elden Hathaway, had approximately 400 customers, who shared roughly 200 phone lines. The company was purchased by the Oxford County Telephone & Telegraph Company, a nearby larger independent company. A movement called "Don't Yank The Crank" was organized by David Perham and Brad Hooper in a valiant, but futile, effort to keep their beloved crank phones. The effort failed, and the last "crank" calls took place on 11 October 1983, when a modern dial exchange was placed in service.
Barbara and Elden Hathaway retired.
Hand crank magneto switchboards evolved around the turn of the last century. To place a call, a customer first picked up to listen to see if someone else was talking on the party line, then hung up and signaled the operator by tuning crank on their telephone. The attached magneto sent electricity down the line to the operator's switchboard which then rang a bell. The operator would answer and, upon request, manually connect the caller to the desired telephone.
The telephone depicted in the statue is a so-called "candlestick phone," named because of its resemblance to candle holders. The phone is 14 feet tall and weighs 3,000 pounds.
You can read a plaque on the base of the statue in one of the pictures.
The town of Bryant Pond apparently likes everything super-sized. The 14-foot-tall telephone is just a hop, skip, and a jump from a 3 story outhouse and a giant butterfly sculpture. But I'll leave those stories and pictures for another time.
All photos and text by Dick Eastman. Please feel free to republish this article and pictures wherever you wish for non-profit use, but please attribute the source. For details, please click here.
