First Telephone Exchange

Fort Stockton's switchboard came three decades after the first in Texas. A. H. Belo, publisher of the Galveston News, saw Alexander Graham Bell's telephone at the 1876 Philadelphia exposition and had a line strung from his newspaper office to his Galveston home on March 18, 1878. The state's first exchange opened in Galveston on August 21, 1879. Boys worked the early switchboards, but their rude remarks and erratic habits led the company in 1884 to try women as night operators at Galveston, and women soon became the rule.

What the plaque says

First Telephone Exchange The Pecos County commissioners authorized E. W. Bennett (1858-1933) to establish Ft. Stockton's First Telephone service in May 1909. The switchboard, operated by Bennett's daughter, Zetta, was located in a room attached to this adobe house, where the Bennetts lived. The wires connected with Ft. Stockton's 200 phone subscribers with Ozona, where Bennett's sons, John and Will, ran the family's telephone exchange. Lines were later strung to other towns, completing this vital communication link. The Ft. Stockton Exchange became part of Southwestern Bell Telephone System in 1928. (1975)

Where it stands

Worth the stop nearby

• Annie Riggs Memorial Museum — 0.4 mi
  An 1899 adobe hotel on Main Street that a twice-married frontier woman bought with her gunfighter husband's estate and ran as a boarding house until she died in 1931.
• Comanche Springs — 0.4 mi
  Once the sixth largest spring in Texas and a campground on the Comanche Trail to Mexico, pumped dry by 1961 under the rule of capture and now flowing again some winters.
• Historic Fort Stockton — 0.7 mi
  The Ninth Cavalry's post at Comanche Springs from 1867 to 1886, with its 1868 stone guardhouse, three adobe officers' quarters and barracks rebuilt from the original plans.

More markers nearby

• Fort Stockton, C.S.A. — 0.3 mi
• Site of Fort Stockton — 0.4 mi
• O. W. Williams — 0.5 mi
• Site of Comanche Springs — 0.6 mi