Fort Bend Telephone Company

Needville was still small when the lines were bought: in 1914 it had three general stores, two cotton gins, a movie theater and about 100 people. The Needville State Bank opened in 1918, the year the Galveston, Harrisburg and San Antonio Railway built through. Oil, natural gas and sulfur were found nearby in the 1920s and 1930s, and by the 1920s the town counted some 500 people, twelve general stores, four churches, four gins and an electric light plant, sold to Houston Lighting and Power in 1926. Natural gas was piped into town in 1929.

What the plaque says

Fort Bend Telephone Company Founded in 1914, the Fort Bend Telephone Company began when Charles H. waddell purchased nine individual telephone lines in the Needville community and established a central switchboard exchange. The company grew quickly and soon connected the neighboring towns of Beasley, Brookshire, Damon, Fairchild, Guy, Katy, and Pattison. Incorporated in 1917, the company installed its first dial system in the late 1950s; rural underground cables in 1962; dial service to Houston in 1973; and digital dialing in 1978. Still family-operated, the company is a significant local business. (1990)

Where it stands

Worth the stop nearby

• Brazos Bend State Park — 17 mi
  Oak and pecan bottomland, lakes and alligators on the Brazos River 45 miles from downtown Houston, with the museum's George Observatory in the woods.
• The Menil Collection — 27 mi
  John and Dominique de Menil's free museum in Montrose: a grey-sided Renzo Piano building among bungalows, holding antiquities, Surrealism and art of Oceania under natural light.
• Museum of Fine Arts, Houston — 27 mi
  The oldest art museum in Texas, grown from a 1900 schoolroom art league into a campus of Watkin, Mies van der Rohe and later buildings, with Ima Hogg's Bayou Bend up the bayou.
• Rothko Chapel — 28 mi
  An octagonal chapel open to all faiths, built by the de Menils around fourteen dark canvases by Mark Rothko, with Barnett Newman's Broken Obelisk standing in the pool outside.

More markers nearby

• Robinowitz Brothers — steps away
• Rosenberg Post Office — steps away
• First Baptist Church of Rosenberg — 0.2 mi
• Trone-Ray-Lane House — 0.4 mi