Telecommunications in Springfield:
Yesterday, Today and Tomorrow.

When Springfield was just a logging town, people communicated by telegraph. Messages were relayed from station to station over wires run next to train tracks. This was a relatively fast method of communication. An important message could make it from coast to coast in fifteen minutes or less. Telegraphs were not commonly used for sending messages between two people, but rather were used to keep the trains running on schedule.

Replica of a turn of the century telegraph.

Orders concerning car loading and movement, train orders, and messages for the brakeman and engineer were sent out from a central office and transcribed by telegraph operators at stations along routes. After being typed out or handwritten, the papers were placed in a sack attached to a ring and hung from a pole along side the tracks. As the train rolled past, the conductor or brakeman would reach out and grab the ring with a long hook, take the sack, and throw the ring back to be used again. It was a jury-rigged system, but it worked incredibly well. The trains were organized, on time and efficient.

Here in Springfield, only spotty details are remembered about early use of telephones. The oldest living employees remember back

Original Springfield phone exchange office.

to the late 1930s and early '40s. Records from before that have been lost or misplaced. It is known that Springfield's first telephone switchboard was installed in the early 1906 in a small building on Main Street as an extension of Eugene lines. In 1911, the city council voted to install four party lines instead of 12. Some time before 1936, Springfield replaced the extension switchboard with a Private Board Exchange system using the stepped switching system associated with rotary-dial telephones. Subscribers in Springfield only needed to dial four numbers, and reaching Eugene or making a long-distance call required an operator's assistance.

Springfield's stepped system was much more high-tech than Eugene's, which relied on rooms of operators manually making connections. Eugene did not switch over to an automatic system until the early '50s. The technology was appreciated, but had its quirks. A fan belt once broke on the cooling system in the Springfield exchange office, and the heat grew to such a point where the switching machines ceased to function. All of Springfield, from Glenwood to Thurston, was without phone service until the cooling system could be repaired and the equipment cooled off.

The old Oakridge switchboard.

The phone system did not extend out past the Thurston area. This was not unusual, as most rural areas had no phone service until the 50s. One region near LaGrande was the exception, with a party line that ran between the houses of several farmers, and into a shop in town. Connections outside the system were made manually by connecting the rural system to the main phone exchange.

Until as late as 50 years ago, call switching still required operator intervention. Eugene's Bell office in Eugene had a large staff of linemen, operators, and technicians. Until the switchover in 1950, all calls were made with operator assistance. When the switchover was made, Eugene's customers now lifted the receiver to hear a dial tone, rather than the 'voice with a smile' that Bell's publicity department liked to talk about.

With the old system, each town had a district name and several prefixes. Eugene was Diamond district, and Springfield was Riverside. Diamond had the 3, 4, and 5 prefixes and Riverside had 6 and 7. Today the DI in Diamond is embodied as the 34 of Eugene's 343, 345 and 346 prefixes. Riverside's RI likewise became the 74 in 746 and 747. Residents used to asking for Diamond 5 - 3451 now dialed 345-3451.

Even with the sophisticated new technology, party line systems were still in use for a long time. Party line meant that several houses or businesses shared the same line, each with a different ring. Although they each had a different phone number, the common line meant that people could pick up their phones and hear the conversation of the neighbor down the street talking long distance to his cousin in Philly. To call someone on the same line, a special code was dialed, after which the phone was replaced on its cradle. The phone then rang, and the caller and the called both picked up the phone.

Early long distance calls were originally carried on separate strands of un-insulated wire. Unlike the bundled masses of cable in use today, each wire was kept

Early multiline coaxial trunk.

separated from the rest, and insulated from the ground with bell-shaped glass cable mounts. This was inefficient, and in 1947 phone companies began the switch to coaxial cable, which could carry many conversations in a single large trunk line. Later, long distance relays were established with microwave relay stations. In the early 1960's a link was created between Eugene and Florence, one of several installed around the same time connecting main call relay centers.

Like the technology, the staff in Eugene and Springfield offices has changed throughout the years. Early workers operated switchboards and worked as linemen. Many new connections needed to be made across the area. After the Second World War, officers from the Army Signal Corps signed on with the phone companies to work as technicians in the office and the field. The Union was strong, and workers struck several times. The largest

Switchboard most recently used in the Eugene office.

strike was in 1948 when workers disagreed with management over such things as wages, insurance, and retirement. Terms were agreed upon, and workers went back to the job. With the advent of automatic switching technology, large numbers of operators were no longer needed and the staffing level of area offices dropped throughout the '70s and '80s. Despite changes in technology, limited local support was maintained in the area until fairly recently. In the early '90s, Bell removed all operators from this area of Oregon and consolidated to a central office in Washington. Today, there is no staff at all in the Springfield exchange, and managers and line techs are all the only employees found in the Eugene office.

Many striking changes have taken place in the last ten to 20 years, and although they impacted us locally they took place on a much larger scale. The antitrust lawsuit against AT&T changed many things for the phone industry as a whole. Services formerly offered only by AT&T were suddenly up for grabs by smaller companies. AT&T was split up into smaller companies that covered individual regions. The phone company had also previously owned all subscriber phones. After the suit, telephones became the responsibility of the individuals who subscribe to service, as is all wiring inside the building past the phone company connection box.

Other things besides just voice communications are now being

Early trunk cable being installed.

carried over telephone lines, and telephone lines are no longer the only method of real-time communications. The Internet has revolutionized the services necessary for any telecommunications business to stay operational.

Home users want dial-up access to check their e-mail and perhaps research stocks or make travel plans. Businesses can buy and sell products on the Internet, which can be bandwidth intensive. Some offices use the fastest connections to hold teleconferences, meetings where people can be thousands of miles apart and yet in the same room.

People in Springfield and Eugene have many options for getting on the Internet. They depend on your requirements, budget, and physical location.

• Dial - Up Connection. This service is what most home users have. It is cheap, available from many providers, and well supported. The down side to this technology is that it slow because it sends tones across a normal phone line. The average data rate is about 33.6 KBPS, and at this rate it would take six minutes to transfer the contents of a floppy disk. It is also not good if the user wants a constant connection, because the computer must dial every time data needs to be transmitted. This service is universally available in the Eugene-Springfield area.



• DSL: Digital Subscriber Line. This is a method of digitally communicating at a high speed over the standard phone lines already installed in a building. Its availability is limited by the fact that the phone lines must be of a fairly high quality. Also, the user must be within range of a phone company repeater unit. In Springfield, this service is available west of about 40th street, and in Glenwood. Send and receive speeds are the same and vary from 112 to 512 KBPS.



• ADSL: Asymmetric Digital Subscriber Line. Like DSL, but the send and receive speeds are different.



• Cable Modem: The same company that offers local cable TV usually offers this service, because they both use the same wire. Connection speeds are high with this service, in the thousands of KBPS. However, people nearby each other are on the same 'loop', so the more people who use the service in an area, the slower each connection will be. This service is scheduled to be available in Springfield residential areas in the summer of 2000.



• Microwave Link: This is a newer service, becoming popular among businesses and high-end home users alike. It is extremely fast, in the tens or hundreds of thousands of KBPS. Its only physical limitation is that a small transceiver must be placed somewhere line-of-site with a central retransmission tower.

Springfield's interesting history of telegraphs and telephones has brought us to where we are today, with people constantly in contact. Ever-varying methods are in use. Cell towers dot the landscape, and optical fiber carries thousand of conversations and reams of data. The future is sure to hold more technology that we cannot even begin to fathom. Only time will tell how events will unfold, but hopefully the next hundred years will hold an many changes for our area as the last hundred has.

Relevant Web Pages: •US West •Springfield Chamber of   Commerce

Back to top. Brad Davidson Telecommunications in Springfield Thurston High School May 19, 2000 Project in its entirity available at The Springfield Museum 590 Main Street Springfield, OR 97477