Woodstock Communications a rare find in telecommunications industry
Reprinted with permission from Edgerton Enterprise
Jill Fennema
Woodstock Communications has been connecting families, businesses, and rural communities in Southwest Minnesota for 75 years. It is an independent, family-owned communications company that Bernard Knuth took over in 1942 in the town of Woodstock. Since that time, the company has grown to serve over 1,200 customers in 12 different communities and has 10 full-time employees.
In 1938, Bernard and Rosetta Knuth moved to Woodstock to purchase the grocery store. In 1940, a meeting between the phone company and local business owners was organized. The phone company representatives said that the central office would be closed and there would be party line service on three phone lines coming into town. Woodstock would have the choice of Pipestone, Edgerton, or Lake Wilson service. The businessmen objected, so the phone company was given to the city of Woodstock to own and manage. An electrician by the name of Melvin Craven was hired to manage it.
In those days, residential phone service was $1.25 per month and a business phone was $2 per month. There were only 38 phones on the Woodstock system.
When World War II started, Craven’s electric business dwindled, so he left town. The Knuths decided to try to keep the phone company running, with Bernard doing the repair work while Rosetta operated the switchboard out of their home. “We managed to provide service as well as we could,” wrote Bernard Knuth. “My wife, Rosetta, took care of the switchboard and cared for five children, which was a task.”
A telephone exchange is a service area for a specific phone company and includes the equipment that connects the telephone lines during a call. In the 1940’s the Bell System was a uniform system of identifying central offices with a three-digit central office code, that was used as a prefix to subscriber telephone numbers. All central offices within a larger region were assigned a common numbering plan “area code.”
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