Antique phones call up memories at museum
JULIE CHAUTIN Contributing Writer

Zeb Bristol Conley, Jr. has donated one of the earliest phone booths used in Andrews, NC to the Cherokee County Historical Museum. Conley's parents, Zeb, Sr. and Annie Elizabeth Faircloth Conley, owned and managed the Andrews Telephone Company from 1924 to 1962.

If you lived in Andrews back in 1924 and were one of the 91 residents who had a telephone, your number would have been easy to remember: all of them were only two digits long. "Call me. My number is 522," might have been a message.

But even if you forgot the number, it would not have mattered. There were no rotary dials yet. Instead, you would call the central operator and give the name of the party you were calling, or the number. The phones were set up on party lines of eight, in order to keep the wiring to a minimum. The operator would ring up the party and plug in the line by hand. Each home had a different ring tone, but usually everyone on the line picked up the phone. And sometimes listened in, as did the operator.

The Cherokee County Historical Museum has one of the original phone booths on display that had been used in Andrews during that era. Zeb Bristol Conley, Jr. donated it in honor of his parents Zeb Conley, Sr. and Annie Elizabeth Faircloth Conley, who owned the Andrews Telephone Company until 1962, and in honor of their employees.

These antique telephones were collected by the Zeb Conley family, the owners of Andrews Telephone Company from before the Great Depression into the early 1960s. The early oak phones followed Alexander Graham Bell's design.

Conley along with a partner, Mark Boone, bought the fledgling Andrews Telephone Company in 1924 from A. T. Dorsey. In 1930 Conley became the sole owner and that same year married Annie Faircloth, a teacher at Andrews High School. The Conleys managed the phone company until they sold it to Western Carolina Telephone Company in 1962 with a total of 700 subscribers.

Zeb Conley, Jr. also donated his collection of antique telephones. When his parents were running their business, their company owned the phones and rented them to their customers, as was the case all over the nation.

Telephones in the 1920s followed Alexander Graham Bell's original designs and were manufactured by Western Electric. Bell was an immigrant from Scotland who made his mark in history with the invention of the telephone in the late 1870s. Oak cases, carbon transducers, and bakelite plastic mouth and ear pieces were the foundations of this technology.

Among the early telephones in the collection are the steel cases and heavy die-cast phone sets that gradually replaced the oak-cased units.

The museum is conveniently located on Peachtree Street east of the courthouse and is the perfect place to take visiting grandchildren this summer. Let them see what life was like before cell phones.

Open Monday through Saturday from 9 to 5. Admission is one dollar for children and three dollars for adults, but the memories are