​Overview

​Scope and Content

The Southwestern Telegraph and Telephone Company, organized in 1881 to operate exchanges in Arkansas and Texas, owned exchanges in Galveston, Houston, Austin, and San Antonio.  A Dallas exchange with forty subscribers opened on June 1, 1881.  In the spring of 1883, Southwestern Telegraph and Telephone was purchased by the Erie Telegraph and Telephone Company, a holding company.  On July 19, 1883, general offices were established at Austin, and in 1889 the Erie Company conveyed all its property back to The Southwestern Telegraph and Telephone Company.

On March 1, 1912, the Bell System firms (the Missouri and Kansas Telephone Company, the Bell Telephone Company of Missouri, the Pioneer Telephone and Telegraph Company of Oklahoma, and the Southwestern Telegraph and Telephone Company) were consolidated to form a new operating unit known as the Southwestern System, with headquarters in St. Louis. These companies were later merged in 1920 to form Southwestern Bell Telephone Company.  With the breakup of the AT&T-owned Bell System in 1984, Southwestern Bell Telephone became a subsidiary of Southwestern Bell Corporation, changing names in 1995 to SBC Communications, Inc, and then to SBC Southwest in December 2002.

Collection consists of correspondence, petitions, contracts, property inventories, and typescript reports regarding telephone and telegraph services in the City of Dallas and across the state of Texas and the Southwestern Telegraph and Telephone Company between 1904 and 1917.  The items concern several issues, including petitions solicited by Southwestern Telegraph and Telephone Company in Texas cities to protest the quality of local telephone services, a proposal to the City of Dallas to merge local telephone companies, inventories and appraisals of the plants and properties of the Dallas Automatic Telephone Company and the Southwestern Telegraph and Telephone Company, a listing of every location of telephone poles in the City of Dallas in 1913, and a unit cost analysis of the Dallas exchange of the Southwestern Telegraph and Telephone Company.  The records were used in the conduct of business of the City of Dallas Public Improvements Committee.

Organization

​The collection is arranged alphabetically by subject.

Access

​Permission to publish, reproduce, distribute, or use by any and all other current or future developed methods or procedures must be obtained in writing from the Dallas Municipal Archives. All rights are reserved and retained regardless of current or future development or laws that may apply to fair use standards.  It is the responsibility of the user to obtain copyright authorization for any images.

Citation

​Southwestern Telegraph and Telephone Company, 1904, 1913-1917 (Box <x>, Folder <y>), Dallas Municipal Archives

Related Materials

Collection 1994-004—Uniform Syst​em of Accounts for Telephone Companies [Publication], 1913

Index Terms

Dallas -- Texas -- History
Telephone -- Texas -- Dallas
Telephone companies -- Texas -- Dallas -- History

Container List