Magneto Telephones
So far as I can tell, the first documented telephone service in the Beaver River country started in 1891 when William Morrison, a Lowville druggist, financed a telephone line to connect the Smith’s Lake Hotel that he owned at today’s Lake Lila with his store in Lowville. This allowed guests arriving in Lowville by train to alert the hotel and allowed the hotel to order supplies from town. Even given the significant cost, the phone line must have been a welcome improvement. Since the railroad through Beaver River did not yet been exist, a trip to town took at least two arduous days by boat and wagon.
Morrison’s telephone connection functioned like an intercom. The wire was only able to connect two telephones. Such systems were popular despite this limitation. They were commonly used to connect businesses to one another, or to connect a person’s business to their home. The signal could carry over long distances making it practical in many applications. The draw-back was that every pair of phones required a separate wire.
The telephone began to be much more widely adopted once a system was devised to connect more than two phones to the same line. This “party line” arrangement meant that any person who picked up one of the phones on the line could hear conversations from all of the other phones.
The phones used in the early days were called magneto phones. They had a hand-held receiver, a separate microphone and a crank typically on the side of the body of the phone. Turning the crank caused an internal magneto to generate an AC current that rang the bells on all the other phones on the line. Each receiver had an assigned pattern of rings. Every phone also contained dry cell batteries to power the talk circuit. Magneto phones came in a variety of styles. As shown in the illustration above, most magneto phones were wooden boxes housing the magneto and the batteries. Another popular style was the candlestick phone intended for use in a living room or office. The candlestick phone had its magneto and batteries out of sight in a nearby box.
Railroads were early adopters of the telephone. Telegraph service had long been an established feature of railroad lines. Poles carrying telegraph wire went up next to the tracks as rail lines were built and every train station had a telegraph set and one or two paid telegraph operators.
We know from the journal of Etta Kempton, wife of the railroad section foreman at Beaver River, that by 1910 the Adirondack Division of the New York Central railroad had already established telephone service up and down the rail line using magneto phones. Telephone wires were hung next to the telegraph wires on the existing poles. The railroad installed telephone sets at various places: in the stations, sometimes in the tool shops and even nailed to posts outside. The railroad published a list of these locations for employees. These phones were used mostly for urgent railroad business. The public typically did not use the railroad’s phones but relied on the telegraph for ordinary communication.
There is no evidence that the camps and homes located at Beaver River Station had private telephone service. In an emergency it was an easy matter for anyone to send a telegram from the railroad station. So far as I can determine, there were only two other telephone lines. Each of them met a specific need.
The first of these special purpose telephone lines ran from Beaver River to the fire tower on Stillwater Mountain. Forest fires devastated many thousands of acres in the Adirondacks in the late 1890s and early decades of the twentieth century especially along railroad lines and in areas that were heavily logged. In response, the state and some private landowners established a network of fire towers so that fires could be detected and hopefully extinguished before they spread. For this system to work it was essential that fire watchers report the smoke they spotted as quickly as possible. Fire towers were usually remote. The solution was for the state to install magneto phones near the towers and construct lines connecting to the nearest forest ranger station.
An entry In Etta Kempton’s journal for Feb. 20, 1912 records that telephone men were running a telephone line from the forest ranger’s house in Beaver River Station to the cabin of the fire warden at the foot of Stillwater Mountain and on up to the fire tower. This line probably followed the railroad as far as possible using the same poles as the railroad’s telegraph and phone lines. In his book Big Moose Station, p. 210, Bill Marleau recounts a story of how Dave Conkey, the forest ranger at the time, used that phone to discover that Del Petrie, the fire watcher, was faking his reports by pretending he was at the tower when he actually was sitting in the cabin.
The No. 12 galvanized iron wires used for the line were usually fastened to trees with porcelain insulators. Crossing swampy areas was accomplished by the use of tripods made from spruce trees. Originally there were seven stations at camps along the line. This line is described in some detail in an article by Robert M. Gillespie in The Telephone Review of October 1914. Gillespie was then a foreman working for the Syracuse division of the Bell Telephone Company and a dedicated sportsman who spent several weeks of the year at Elmer Wilder’s “Camp Happy” on Salmon Lake.
When the Rap-Shaw Club moved their clubhouse to Beaver Dam Pond in 1917, it extended the phone line there. They left a magneto phone in a box nailed to a tree at the site of the old Witchhopple Lake camp. Newspaper clippings indicate they also ran a line to at least one other favorite lake. A candlestick desk phone was placed in the clubhouse living room. By this time all the other camps along the Red Horse trail had been removed from the state forest preserve, so the only other telephones on the line were at the train station and the Norridgewock Hotel. The club frequently hired Walter and Clinton Thompson from the Norridgewock to repair the phone lines after storm-blown branches brought them down.
The phone connection to the hotel and train station proved to be valuable to the Rap-Shaw Club. It made it possible for members and guests to let the steward know of their arrival or of any change of plans. During the deer hunting season in 1925 the steward was able of summon life-saving help when a guest was accidentally shot in the face. For details of that event, see my article in Adirondack Almanack, 11/26/2017, “Rap-Shaw Club 1925 Hunting Accident” https://www.adirondackalmanack.com/2017/11/rap-shaw-club-1925-hunting-accident.html#more-76246
The Red Horse telephone line continued to be used by the club until the winter of 1938-39 when Rap-Shaw’s Beaver Dam Pond camp burned down. Rather than rebuilding, the club moved to a camp on Williams Island near the Stillwater boat landing. Board minutes from 1939-40 show significant expenditures to salvage equipment from the former camp. Among the items brought to Williams Island were the generator, the boats and two magneto telephones.
The Red Horse telephone line was abandoned after the 1939 fire. Two club members exploring the ruins many years later found the old candlestick phone in the rubble. That phone now resides in a place of honor in the club’s dining room on Williams Island. On a hike not long ago, my wife Merry Leonard spotted a surviving ceramic insulator on a tree near Salmon Lake. Nothing else is left of the historic phone line.
Since the Williams Island camp was on an island [duh], club members still needed a way to contact the steward for a boat ride to the camp. The two salvaged magneto phones were soon put back into service. Until the early 1960s the club had its own dock at the Stillwater landing. There was a storage shed next to the dock just above the high-water line. Mounted on the back of the shed facing the water was a protective wooden box and inside the box, one of the old magneto telephones. A telephone line ran from the shed under the water to a matching magneto phone in the kitchen on Williams Island. That arrangement continued for many years until the telephone company constructed the current phone line and installed a pay phone in a booth near the hotel at the landing. After that club members used the pay phone to summon the steward until the advent of cell phones.
photo from the collection of Dennis Buckley
Interesting...when my grandfather was a young teen he and his cousin got into trouble on their trap line, got lost in a heavy snow after slipping into water and becoming wet with their matches also wet. They determined they must return to Purcell's at Stillwater. They were about froze and in a bad way. My grandfather said they called Lowville for the doctor to come the next day. I always thought it odd they could call for a doctor but this helps it make sense!
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