When Fences Became Phone Lines

In the 1890s, Great Plains farmers faced a problem: they desperately needed telephones, but the Bell Telephone Company thought rural areas were too expensive and unsophisticated to serve. So, farmers built their own system—using barbed wire fences. By 1920, these homemade networks had made farmers more connected than city dwellers. This is the story of whiskey bottle insulators, party line eavesdropping, and how the devil's rope became a lifeline across the isolated prairie.

Want to see more? See historical photos and more glimpses of prairie life on Instagram: @rootedintheplains

Want to learn more?

"A Cheap Telephone System for Farmers." Scientific American 82, no. 13 (March 31, 1900): 196. http://www.jstor.org/stable/24982232.

"A Wire Fence Telephone Wanted." Scientific American 71, no. 16 (October 20, 1894): 249. http://www.jstor.org/stable/26115301.

Arguimbau, Ellen. "From Party Lines and Barbed Wire: A History of Telephones in Montana." Montana: The Magazine of Western History 63, no. 3 (Autumn 2013): 34–93. http://www.jstor.org/stable/24416215.

Dawson Public Power District. "Ghost Towns: A Look at Our Past." Accessed January 3, 2026. https://dawsonpower.com/2020/10/ghost-towns-a-look-at-our-past/.

Eckhardt, C. F. "Before Ma Bell: Rural Telephone Systems in the West." Texas Escapes. Accessed January 3, 2026. https://www.texasescapes.com/CFEckhardt/Rural-Telephone-Systems-in-the-West.htm.

Emerson, Lori. "Barbed Wire Networks." In Other Networks: A Radical Technology Sourcebook. University of Colorado Boulder, forthcoming 2025.

Fischer, Claude S. "The Revolution in Rural Telephony, 1900-1920." Journal of Social History 21, no. 1 (Autumn 1987): 5–26. http://www.jstor.org/stable/3788072.

Holmes, Bob. "The Wired Wild West." New Scientist 220, no. 2948 (December 21, 2013): 76–77.

Sicilia, David B. "How the West Was Wired." Inc. 19, no. 9 (1997): 74.

Trew, Delbert. "Barbed Wire Telephones." Texas Escapes. Accessed January 3, 2026. https://www.texasescapes.com/DelbertTrew/Barbed-Wire-Telephones.htm.

Transcript

SPEAKER_00 0:04

Welcome to Rooted in the Plains, a podcast about the people, places, and moments that shape the Great Plains. I'm Nicole, and in each episode, I take you back to a time when sod houses lined the prairie, railroads carved through the tall grass, and community meant survival. For photos, maps, and glimpses of Plains life, be sure to follow along on Instagram at Rooted in the Plains. Loneliness was a fact of life on the Great Plains. Homesteads three miles apart. Towns fifteen miles away. Weeks without seeing another soul. Women especially felt it. Isolated in sod houses during planting season, during harvest, during the endless stretches when men were out working. And then the telephone rang. Not on a copper wire strung by a telephone company, on a barbed wire fence that farmers had strung themselves. Suddenly, a woman three miles north could read you this morning's newspaper. The rancher five miles south could warn you about a prairie fire. And if a child went missing, one long ring could summon 50 neighbors within minutes. This is the story of how the Great Plains farmers turned isolation into connection, one fence wire at a time. To understand why barbed wire telephones mattered, you have to understand what life was like on the Great Plains before them. Picture the landscape. Endless stretches of prairie, broken up by homesteads, scattered miles apart. Your nearest neighbor might be three miles away. The closest town, ten, fifteen miles down a rutted dirt road that turned into mud when it rained and dust when it didn't. This wasn't just rule, this was isolated. And women felt it the most. The men in hired hands would leave at dawn to work the fields or move cattle. They might not come back until after dark. For weeks at a time, a woman might not see another soul except for her own children. A government report from 1907 described it in this way. A sense of community life is impossible without the ready means of communication. Sense of loneliness and insecurity felt by farmers' wives under former conditions disappears. Loneliness, insecurity. Those were the words they used. But it wasn't just about being lonely. Isolation was dangerous. What do you think if there's a medical emergency and the nearest doctor is 15 miles away? What if there's a prairie fire moving fast across dry grass and you need to warn your neighbors? What if a child wanders off and gets lost? What if you need help right now and there's no way to call for it? And then there were the economic needs. Farmers needed to know crop prices, where to hire labor, when to sell cattle, all the information that could make or break a farming operation. So when Alexander Graham Bell patent the telephone in 1876, you'd think that that would solve everything, right? It didn't. Because the Bell Telephone Company had absolutely no interest in serving rural areas. Bell focused exclusively on cities, on businesses, on places where they could pack a lot of customers close together and make the investment in infrastructure worth it. Running telephone lines out in scattered homesteads across the Great Plains, too expensive, not profitable, and frankly, Bell thought rural people were too unsophisticated to even use telephones properly. But what was worse than just being ignored? The telephone companies didn't just skip over rural areas. They actively tried to control how people use their telephones. Bell's early managers sought to limit what they called frivolous telephoning. They especially wanted to crack down on undignified activities like courting and gossiping over the telephone, wanted to control certain groups of users like women, children, and servants who they thought would be particular offenders. So you've got isolated farming families who desperately needed communication. And you've got telephone companies that think they're not worth serving, can't afford it, and probably wouldn't use phones correctly anyway. And then something changed. In 1893 and 1894, Bell's original patents expired. And suddenly, overnight, 80 to 90 independent telephone companies sprang up across the country. Competition? Finally. Except the independent companies looked at rural areas and pretty much came up with the same conclusion Bell had. Too expensive, too scattered, and not worth the investment. But the independents had a little different approach. Instead of ignoring the farmers, they said, you want telephones, you build them yourselves. Buy your own equipment, string your own lines, create your own cooperatives, and we'll sell you the phones. But the infrastructure, that's on you. And you know what the farmers said? They said yes. Because farmers on the Great Plains had a long tradition of working together. They'd already built cooperative grain elevators, cooperative irrigation systems, cooperative insurance groups, and they knew how to pool resources and solve problems as a community. But there was still one massive obstacle. The cost of wire. That's when someone, we don't know exactly who or where, looked out across the Great Plains and realized something. The wire was already there. Because in 1874, just two years before Bell invented the telephone, a farmer named Joseph Glidden had patented something we are very familiar with: barbed wire. And if you're unfamiliar with the story, you should go back to season one, episode two, because that's where we learned about it. But here's what matters to our story. By 1890, barbed wire was everywhere. Miles and miles of it, strung across every fence line from Montana to Texas. Already in place, already paid for. What if you didn't need to string new copper wire at all? What if you just needed to hook a telephone to the fence? That seemed crazy. Barbed wire wasn't designed to carry electrical signals. It wasn't insulated copper wire like the telephone companies used. It was just steel wire with sharp barbs twisted into it, stapled directly to a wooden fence post. It grounded out when it rained, cattle rubbed up against it, bulls with enough determination could break right through it. This should not work, but someone decided to try it anyway. The earliest documented evidence we have comes from 1894, when a Texas rancher wrote to Scientific American Magazine. Cowboys riding fences to check for brakes had to ride maybe 10 to 15 miles just to report a problem. But with a telephone hooked to the same fence line, instant communication. By 1900, it was working. Scientific American described a barbed wire system in Indiana, 14 miles long, with five stations. It used the top wire of a barbed wire fence as its conductor. And in 1904, a tiny settlement called Sawd Town in Buffalo County, Nebraska, just a cluster of Sawd buildings at a crossroad, two farmers decided to give it a try. Two farmers, two telephones, and one barbed wire fence line. It worked. Within a few years, the Sawd Town Telephone Company had grown from those two farmers to 130 telephones. The setup was simple. You ordered a telephone from a mail order catalog like Sears or Montgomery Ward. The phone came with its own battery that provided the electrical current to carry your voice. You turn a crank on the side of the telephone that spun a little generator called the Magneto, and that created a different kind of electrical current that would ring the bells on everyone else's phones. As one Texas rancher put it, and listen to this, especially remembering what Bell thought of those rural people using telephones, some unknown genius discovered that if you hooked two Sears or Montgomery Ward telephone sets to the top of a barbed wire fence, you could talk between telephones as easily as between two town telephones. A rural telephone system had no operators, no bills, and no long-distant charges. Of course, there were problems. When it rained, water would short out the system. The solution, insulators. Farmers used whatever they had, corn cobs, strips of leather, pieces of old tires, but the best option? Specifically, whiskey bottles. You'd collect empties from behind a local saloon, break off the necks, and hang them to your fence posts. In Montana, one farmer described his system in this way in 1920. This company is a mutual affair. There are 25 stockholders. There is no money paid into the company. Each man is supposed to help keep up his line by giving labor. The only money paid out is 50 cents per month for switch service. Everything else, the labor, the maintenance, the fixing brakes, was done by neighbors working together. The cost of setup, about $25 per household for the telephone batteries, and basic equipment. After that, they're privately owned, but used for the good of the community. By the early 1900s, these barbed wire telephone systems were spreading across the Great Plains. Farmers were proving that you didn't need the telephone company. You just needed a wire, ingenuity, and neighbors willing to work together. And when those phone lines lit up, that's when things got interesting. Now, for some of you listening, you might have grown up with party lines yourselves. You remember the ring patterns, too short and a long, maybe. You remember hearing the clicks when your neighbors picked up. You remember your mother shooing you away from the phone when Mrs. Johnson down the road was talking. But here's what made these early barbed wire party lines different. First, scale. These weren't just party lines, these were neighborhood networks. 25 families on a single fence line, sometimes more. And because the wire literally ran along property boundaries, you were connected to exactly the people you saw most, your actual neighbors. The ones you might need to borrow a tool from, or warn about a fire, or call for help. Second, they weren't actually built by a telephone company. There was no infrastructure, no maintenance crew. When a bull broke through the fence and snapped your phone line, you and your neighbors had to ride out and splice it back together yourselves. And third, people use them differently than the telephone companies ever intended. Farmers read newspapers aloud to each other. They organized musical nights where someone would play the banjo and others would sing along. If someone had a radio, they'd broadcast news reports over the phone line to their neighbors who didn't. People didn't just use the phone, they hung out on it. And yes, when party invitations went out over the line, everyone who had been eavesdropping would show up. But these lines were also emergency systems. One long continuous ring meant everyone picked up. A prairie fire, a medical emergency. The phone companies had wanted to control frivolous uses of the phone. No gossiping, no courting, no musical entertainment. But out on the Great Plains, farmers used their barbed wire phones however they wanted. For business and pleasure, for emergencies, and for everyday life. Because to them, none of it was frivolous. By 1920, something remarkable had happened on the Great Plains. 39% of American farms had telephones. Only 33% of city homes did. Let me say that again. In 1920, farmers were more connected than city dwellers. In the plains states, subscription rates topped 80%. Meanwhile, in the urban east, most people didn't have phones at home. This wasn't how technology was supposed to spread. Innovations always went to the cities first, then slowly trickled out to the rural areas. That was how it always worked. Except this time, it didn't. Farmers didn't wait for telephone companies to decide they were worth serving. They built it themselves with barbed wire, with whiskey bottles and insulators, with neighbors willing to splice wires back together after that bull broke through the fence. In 1907, there were 18,000 of these small telephone cooperatives across 10 Midwestern states, serving one and a half million rural households. And in that same year, the independent telephone companies, most of them farmer-owned cooperatives, had more subscribers than the Bell Telephone Company. The companies that said rural people were too unsophisticated for telephones, the ones that said they were too expensive, too scattered, and not worth the investment, they were wrong. As one historian put it, these farmers translated their fencing revolution into a communication revolution, making them for a few brief decades the best networked population in the nation. And of course, the barbed wire telephone era didn't last forever. By the 1920s, the Great Plains were facing harsh realities. Drought, crop failures, an agricultural depression that hit years before the rest of the country felt it. One Montana farmer wrote to the State Railroad Commission in 1926: this company, owing to drought conditions, is gone bust. We have 26 stockholders still hanging on. By resetting a pole here and there, also by putting the wire on the fence, we still manage to have some kind of service. Still hanging on, still resetting poles, still making it work. But the world was changing. Long-distance connections became more important. People wanted to call relatives in distant cities, not just the neighbor down the road. The professionally built telephone networks, with their operators and trunk lines and connection to the wider world started to look more appealing, even if it costs more. The barbed wire systems peaked in the 1920s. And slowly, over the next few decades, they faded. But that's another story. What matters for our story in this moment is this brief window between the 1890s and 1920 when the Great Plains farmers took that technology that wasn't meant for them, a wire that was meant to divide property, and decided to build something remarkable. They didn't wait for permission. They didn't wait for the telephone companies to decide that they were sophisticated enough or profitable enough or worth the investment. They just hooked up the phone to the fence and started talking. And in doing so, they proved something important. That isolation doesn't have to mean disconnected. That rules doesn't mean backward. That sometimes the people who need technology most are the ones that'll figure it out and build it themselves. For a few decades, the devil's rope became a lifeline. Fences became phone lines, and the most isolated people in America became the most connected. One rancher who lived through the barbed wire telephone era said it best. The buried cables and fiber optics of today are a long way from the barbed wire fence telephone lines. However, to me, the ability to talk over wire is still somewhat of a miracle. Thanks for listening to Rooted in the Plains. I hope you learned something new today. And if you haven't already, check out Season 1, Episode 2 to hear the full story of how barbed wire transformed the open range. Thanks.