Gridley Telephone Museum
Gridley, Illinois is home to a true central Illinois small-town gem: The Gridley Telephone Museum. Preserving over a century of telephone history, this museum is made up of telecommunication items and artifacts that were used in the Gridley community.
Early communication was revolutionized when Alexander Graham Bell presented the first telephone to the world at the 1876 Philadelphia Exposition, demonstrating how sound could travel along a wire. Prior to 1900, very few telephone lines existed in central Illinois, and most of them were owned and operated by farmers.
Once phones began to be more widely used and manufactured, Ward Heisert, a local hardware store owner, launched the first telephone company in Gridley, IL in 1900 with 63 telephones. In 1901, just a year later, a fire destroyed the hardware store along with the telephone exchange, but the phone company was immediately rebuilt, which included installing its first switchboard. Daisy Whitman became the first switchboard operator in Gridley.
The telephone company switched hands in 1914 after Charles Hubler became the sole owner and retained ownership until 1970. During this time, Gridley notably continued using a manual switchboard with an operator rather than adopting the dial systems common in other communities.
Then, when Rogers Kaufman purchased the company in 1970, he modernized operations by burying cables and transitioning to touch-tone phones by 1972. Gridley was notably the first community in downstate Illinois to have buried cable and touch tone dialing, but the second-to-last community to still have a switchboard in Illinois.
Crucially, after purchasing the telephone company, Kaufman also recognized that Hubler had preserved all equipment taken out of service over the decades, providing the foundation for a museum.
Today, the museum features a recreation of a 1920 telephone office, and its centerpiece is a Kellogg two-position universal switchboard—believed to be the only operable switchboard in the country that has been in continual use since 1946. While visiting the museum, visitors can experience firsthand how calls were once made using the switchboard and a display of connected vintage phones.
Like many small towns, Gridley has diminished over the years as more people are drawn to neighboring communities. The Gridley Telephone Museum stands as an important historical and cultural point of interest.
For more information, visit telephonemuseumofgridley.com.
