(By Stephen Kelley from The Peoples Defender, 2008)

Cell phones, wireless computers, communications satellites.. and the list goes on and on. It seems that communication with your next door neighbor or with someone halfway around the world is now so implified, quick and sophisticated. The transformation of communications equipment in this day and age is mind boggling for someone like myself who grew up with a wooden-case wall telephone where we had to ring the local operator before we could make contact with anyone else.

So, where did all of this begin in Adams County? Bentonville. Yep, that’s right. In a grist mill of all places. In 1881, Marion Francis Crissman and Nathaniel Green Foster bought a flour mill in Bentonville and began operating it as “Eureka Mills.” Here, they ground wheat into flour and corn into cornmeal. They bought the grain from local farmers and sold, flour, meal, shipstuff, and bran to the public. Their advertising read, Grist grinding a specialty and roller process flour.

Realizing the need to keep their business on the cutting edge of technology and ahead of their competitors, Crissman and Foster took a bold step into the future in 1883 when they, “built the first telephone line constructed in Adams County, connecting West Union and Bentonville at Manchester with the Western Union Telegraph Company’s lines…”

As might be expected, once this new fangled telephone was in operation connecting Eureka Mills with potential customers in West Union and Manchester, other business followed suit. Within a short time, another telephonic connection was made between West Union and Peebles featuring a telephone not only in both of these villages, but with a telephone in both Dunkinsville and Jacktown.

Writing in 1958, the late Clarence T. Sproull chronicled the early history of the telephone in Adam County. Concerning those earliest telephones in Bentonville, Jacktown, Peebles and the like, he wrote, “These phones were in stores or other establishments, so of course afforded no night or Sunday service to even the small number of the public who had any desire to use them.

As the years passed, it became obvious to the general public that there were advantages to having telephones. Therefore, it did not take long for local entrepreneurs to seize upon the opportunity to meet the public’s demand for them In 1899, E.A. Crawford, editor of “The People’s Defender” with a couple of business partners, established the Acme Bell Telephone Company in West Union. The telephone exchange was set up in a room on the east side of the William C. Leach home on the north side of the courthouse square.

The first telephone operator of the Acme Bell Telephone Company was William C. Leach’s daughter, Lilian, with her mother Flora Leach, serving as a relief operator. When the company first powered up, it had fifty paying customers in the county seat. The company had tapped into the already existing line that served Dunkinsville, Jacktown and Peebles and also was connected to one long-distance line that led from West Union to Manchester and Ripley, thence to Cincinnati and other outside points, according to Mr. Sproull.

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