300 Cooperation in Agriculture 



The rural telephone service dates back thirty-three 

 years ago when the Bell Company, which then controlled 

 the patents, leased telephones to be used between the 

 residences of a community. They were not exchange 

 telephones, and under this system the farmers of a com- 

 munity could enjoy a telephone service, though they were 

 not connected with any other line. The next step oc- 

 curred in the early eighties, when these independent circuits 

 were connected through an exchange. After 1893, when 

 the principal patents on the telephones expired, the 

 farmers began to organize their own lines, the movement 

 being aided by the Bell and other commercial companies 

 in order to develop a large rural service that would even- 

 tually be connected with the great trunk systems of the 

 Bell Company. The evolution of the rural telephone 

 system is thus related by the Bureau of the Census. 



"In those communities where the farmers have built 

 their own telephone lines, the original form of organization 

 has been purely mutual. Construction has been a co- 

 operative work, and the association of the farmers the most 

 primitive type of corporation. The establishment and 

 development of such farmers' telephone systems have 

 usually gone on along evolutionary lines, and have followed 

 more or less closely the form herewith outlined. A group 

 of farmers who lived within a reasonable distance of one 

 another, having come to the conclusion that telephone 

 service was an essential comfort of life, and that it had 

 already passed from the region of luxuries into the field of 

 necessities, would meet together and arrange to establish 

 a telephone system which should connect them with one 

 another. The work involved in constructing such system 



