Making the connection: Family tells of Hinton phone history

Cilbert Harrison, who brought widespread telephone service to Hinton, connects calls at his original switchboard in 1916 in Hinton. The switchboard was housed in the family home. Later, they purchased a 52-plug switchboard that was used by Cilbert's wife Florence for years. Inset: The telephone switchboard now resides at the Plymouth County Historical Museum in the technology room, donated by Cilbert's descendents. [Click to enlarge]

You could call from the flour mill or the general store.

Then Cilbert Harrison changed it all.

In 1904 he went to work transforming the town.

Cilbert and his uncles and cousins ran telephone lines throughout the community.

By the next year, a telephone exchange with dozens of lines in Hinton was up and running in the back room of the general store he ran.

"Cilbert was always taking on projects," said Justin Herbst, of Merrill, Cilbert's great-great grandson.

Cilbert, born in 1866, grew up in a family of entertainers and started out as an entertainer himself -- playing banjo and harmonica and even performing a levitation act.

Then he farmed east of Hinton and went house to house as a peddler, selling store goods to farmers, later opening the general store and then the telephone business.

Cilbert and his crew even built some of the first telephones in Hinton out of factory phone parts and wood, Herbst said.

"My grandfather was really inventive," said Elaine Oxenford, Cilbert's granddaughter.

Oxenford now lives in Cedar Rapids, but spent her early hears in Hinton, watching her grandmother Florence Harrison and then her father and mother Stuart and Violet (Harrison) Jones run the telephone switchboard.

The phone system then was a world away from today's cellphones, Oxenford said.

If anyone wanted to call someone else, they first rung the operator at the telephone switchboard.

"We'd say, 'operator, number please,'" Oxenford said.

The operator would plug one cord into a hole on the switchboard with the caller's number on it and another cord into the hole with the number of the person they wanted to talk to.

"They were numbered one to 52," Oxenford said. "There was only 52."

If people wanted to call someone outside of Hinton, the operator would connect them with the Sioux City operator for further connections.

The calls were timed by the operator, who hand-wrote the caller's bill.

"They really had to trust us," Oxenford said.

In Hinton, some people had a private line to their home, but others shared a line with other families.

"People would listen in to other people's conversations," Oxenford said. "As people listened in, the call got fainter, so you could tell people were listening, but you couldn't tell who it was. Everybody on that line knew everybody's business."

The telephone operator could listen in to any conversation, but Oxenford said it was the family rule never to talk about anything they heard.

"Privacy was so important. Grandma Harrison instilled this in us," said Evelyn Harrison, Florence's granddaughter-in-law, who lives in Hinton.

"I couldn't remember how I heard things...legitimately or while serving as an operator...so it was best not to say much, not to get yourself in trouble," she said. "People's confidence was so very important."

But being a phone operator also required full-time attention.

"Grandma was just tied to the telephone switchboard," Oxenford said. "She never left."

A line had been connected to the Harrison home by 1912 so Florence could take care of ailing parents -- and eight children -- while running the switchboard.

During the day, Florence only had a few hours away from the ringing lines.

At night, she slept on the same floor as the switchboard so she'd wake up to connect any calls that came through at night.

"People didn't use the phone much at night, only for emergencies," Oxenford said. "And Sundays were very quiet."

The hard calls were the ones during war time, when families would be notified a loved one had died in battle.

In 1948, Florence -- who was widowed in 1923 -- retired from the switchboard. Her daughter Violet's family took over the operation.

"My dad built a two-story cement building downtown Hinton and they lived upstairs and the switchboard was on the main floor," Oxenford said.

The family's paint and TV sales and repair business shared the same building.

Violet ran the switchboard for more than a decade.

"When there was a fire, my mom would put all the plugs in and ring ten times and then state where the fire was," Oxenford said. "It also alerted the volunteer fire department."

Once, when the Floyd River flooded in the 1950s, the switchboard was on the main floor, so to keep it out of the water, the family stacked cement blocks under it.

"Mom's chair was raised right along with it," Oxenford recalled. "She had a ladder to get to the chair."

Through the years, the telephone became part of the family's life.

Cilbert, always the entertainer, created a sort of "radio show" over the phone. For a few cents a month, he'd connect people's phone lines in the evening and play banjo or harmonica and entertain them over the phone, according to Herbst.

The switchboard would later be part of family gatherings like birthdays and Christmas.

"We couldn't leave the switchboard," Oxenford said. "We took turns going up and down to answer the calls."

Oxenford remembers her nervousness when she tried her hand at the switchboard for the first time.

"Especially when there were so many lines ringing at once," Oxenford said. "My mother would just say, 'take your time."

She and Violet's three other children all took their turn at the switchboard.

"I can still remember people's numbers," Oxenford said. "It's ingrained, like using a typewriter or riding a bike."

In 1960, Oxenford's brother Lamar Jones, Sr. switched the telephone system to a modern dial system.

"They still used recordings of Violet's voice," Herbst said.

He's been tracing his family's past since he was 7 years old.

When Herbst came into possession of the old 52-connection switchboard, he decided to donate it to the Plymouth County Museum.

"It should be something the whole community can see," he said.

He stopped by the museum Monday and brushed a little dust off the switches, touching the same cords his great-great grandmother used to connect calls.

"It's pretty amazing," Herbst said. "It's our family history."