Here's a quaint reminder of the days when everyone had a land line, and the Lorain Telephone Company had to construct these similar brick buildings to contain the dial equipment needed to improve or add service to a specific area.
In this case, the Avon building was getting an addition that would 'increase capacity of the Avon central office from 300 lines to 500 lines,' according to the ad copy. The ad appeared in the Lorain Journal on January 27, 1953.
Note the appearance of the little telephone mascot (the subject of many blog posts, including this one showing examples of him in ads over the years).
And here's a full-page ad showing the 13 Lorain Telephone exchange buildings in use ten years later in November 1963. The Avon one is shown, looking like the illustration in the 1953 ad, but not enlarged as shown.
Who could have imagined that Avon's population would explode from about 2,700 in 1950 to about 26,000 today – and that the historic Lorain Telephone Company name would be a dim memory? (Even dimmer now that the successor company CenturyLink has been taken over by Brightspeed.)
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Those little brick exchange buildings have popped up on this blog several times, including this post (as well as this one) about the one on Meister Road near my boyhood home.
Most people don't realize that telephone companies typically started as local concerns and then later connected together or replaced altogether.
ReplyDeleteIn old ads (In Elyria, for example) you sometimes see both "Elyria" and a "Bell" numbers listed. One location. Two phones. One for each system.
Lots of technology is like that: roads, canals, railroads, telegraphs, paved highways, the Internet.
Railroads are a great example. Up until the 1880s (I think), cars weren't allowed to be transferred from one train company to the next, even when their gauges matched. Where lines met, everything, passengers and freight, had to be physically moved from one train to another. That's how a whole bunch of towns and cities got their starts, as transfer hubs between railroads.