Odessa Telephone Exchange

The company Odessa's exchange joined in 1928 was then sixteen years old. Southwestern Bell Telephone Company was formed on March 1, 1912, by consolidating the Missouri and Kansas Telephone Company, the Missouri Bell Telephone Company, the Pioneer Telephone Company of Oklahoma and the Southwestern Telegraph and Telephone Company, with headquarters in St. Louis. It installed its first dial exchange in Dallas on July 30, 1921, and that December Wichita Falls became the first city with all dial telephones. By the end of 1946 Southwestern Bell ran more than 930,000 telephones in 247 Texas exchanges.

What the plaque says

Odessa Telephone Exchange Began operation about 1897, with Edna Fielding as "central" (operator). After Miss Fielding's death in 1902, the Rev. G. B. Ely, a baptist minister, purchased the exchange. Pioneer rancher A. Quincy Cooper bought the system in 1911, and extended service to rural areas, utilizing barbed wire fences as telephone lines. While checking his repairs on a barbed wire line on Jan. 25, 1915, Cooper interrupted the first transcontinental telephone call between Alexander Graham Bell in New York and his assistant in San Francisco. In 1928, the exchange became part of the southwestern bell telephone company. (1974)

Where it stands

Worth the stop nearby

• White-Pool House — 0.4 mi
  Odessa's oldest standing building, an 1887 brick house of a family the Texas and Pacific drew west, later cut into apartments for the oil boom and now a free house museum.
• Odessa Meteor Crater — 9.0 mi
  A shallow bowl in the ranchland southwest of Odessa where a shower of iron meteorites struck in the late Ice Age, with a trail down into it and a small museum on the rim.
• Midland Army Air Field Museum — 11 mi
  A hangar museum at Midland's airport, run by Commemorative Air Force volunteers, telling how a 1927 grass field became the bombardier college that graduated 6,627 officers in World War II.
• Permian Basin Petroleum Museum — 19 mi
  Midland's museum of the oil basin it sits on, from a restored diorama of the Permian reef to a 40-acre yard of drilling rigs and Jim Hall's Chaparral race cars.

More markers nearby

• Odessa Land & Townsite Company — steps away
• Site of The Odessa Sanitarium — steps away
• Site of The Dawson Saloon — steps away
• Ector County Courthouse — steps away