Farmers used barbed wire fences as phone lines

@Mark Ollig

During the 1880s and 1890s, most rural areas in Minnesota lacked commercial telephone service.

Bell, the national organization named for inventor Alexander Graham Bell, and other companies mainly served larger towns, leaving farmers without service.

In Minnesota, its Bell-licensed operating company was the Northwestern Telephone Exchange Company, incorporated in Minneapolis in 1878.

Farms were often miles from the nearest exchange, and pole lines across open land were costly to build and maintain, so commercial telephone companies commonly delayed rural service.

By the 1880s and 1890s, farmers in southern and western Minnesota had already installed miles of galvanized steel barbed wire fencing to manage their livestock.

Farmers realized the metal in their fences could carry electrical current, which sparked a creative idea.

They used these fences as improvised telephone lines, letting farmers talk with neighbors from their homes.

Many sources called them fence line telephone systems, which used a single-wire earth-return circuit, with the barbed wire serving as the line conductor.

A copper lead-in wire ran from the telephone’s L1 terminal and was clamped to the fence’s top strand.

The return path for speech and ringing current was the ground.

A second wire ran from the telephone’s L2 terminal to a ground rod, often an iron rod driven into the soil.

When you talked, current left your telephone, traveled along the fence to your neighbor’s telephone, went into their ground connection, passed through the earth, and returned through your ground rod to complete the circuit.

The fence line acted as a single conductor, carrying speech or ringing current, powered during conversation by dry-cell batteries inside the telephone or a nearby external battery box.

To place a call, the user turned a hand crank, generating a brief burst of higher-voltage alternating current from the magneto that rang the bells on every telephone connected to the line.

In some cases, as many as 20 telephones shared a single fence line circuit, so every party-line bell rang when someone called, unless neighbors used agreed-upon ring codes.

Insulators included glass bottle necks, leather straps, rubber hose pieces, or even corn cobs, used to keep the wire from touching damp wooden fence posts and leaking electricity.

These homebuilt telephone systems created party lines that connected neighbors over long distances, allowing them to share news, organize farm work, and call for help in emergencies.

A Minnesota newspaper offered a detailed look at how fence line telephony worked.

The Freeborn County Times of Albert Lea published an article Aug. 31, 1900, describing how people were turning fence lines into working telephone lines.

The article explained that barbed wire fences were being used as conductors, allowing farmers to build low-cost telephone systems without erecting traditional pole lines.

It described a system in which the top strand of the fence line served as the main line, with insulation improvised at fence posts and crossings to prevent electrical leakage.

The paper reported that the fence line system extended about 15 miles and had been in operation since late December, with only brief interruptions, including one caused when a cow broke the wire after being struck by a train.

It said the entire line was built for less than $100, and that the telephone outfit itself cost no more than $10, highlighting how inexpensive these systems could be.

These fence line systems typically used wall-mounted, hand-cranked magneto telephones, the standard rural instruments of the era.

Dry-cell batteries inside the telephone supplied low-voltage direct current to the carbon transmitter for talking, while turning the hand crank generated a brief burst of higher-voltage alternating current to ring the bells on other phones sharing the line.

Because ground conditions affected signal quality, farmers learned that wet soil improved performance, while dry ground could weaken it, and some even joked that it was “time to go out and water the grounding rod.”

Barbed wire isn’t the best medium for carrying sound, as voice quality fades over longer distances and during storms, and calls often contained some noise.

Even with these quirks, fence line telephones were still an important way for rural farms to stay connected.

Fence line telephones made it easier to get help with farm equipment, report fires, call for medical aid, share weather updates, and chat across miles of farmland in the evenings.

Linking farms along property lines, they formed local networks that served rural communities.

These homemade telephone systems brought basic communication to rural areas long before commercial telephone service reached many Minnesota farms.

By the early 1900s, fence line systems drew the attention of state lawmakers.

The St. Paul Globe reported Feb. 26, 1903, on two Minnesota House bills designed to settle disputes over fence line telephone connections.

The article said the bills were introduced by Rep. Charles H. Klein of District 25, representing Carver County, and Rep. Jacob D. Schroeder of District 14, representing Jackson County.

The proposals reflected growing pressure from rural users pushing back against Bell-affiliated telephone companies.

While both bills failed, the debate made clear that by 1903, farmers were making fence line telephone service a viable mode of communication in rural Minnesota.

An article in the Park Rapids Enterprise reported March 21, 1912, that Minnesota collected $163,052.28 in gross earnings taxes from 695 telephone companies in 1911.

Taxes ranged from 12 cents to $70,059.63.

The Carlisle Barbed Wire Telephone Company was highlighted for using fence lines instead of poles, paying 87 cents in taxes.

This shows that even fence line telephone systems were treated as taxable telephone operations under Minnesota law.

As the federal Rural Electrification Administration (REA) financed new power lines across the countryside in the late 1930s and 1940s, grounded distribution circuits often ran near older, single-wire, earth-return farm telephone fence lines.

That closeness let 60-cycle power fields (and their harmonics) couple into those fence line circuits, adding a loud hum that could make conversations extremely difficult.

Farmers began switching from fence line networks to telephone cooperatives or independent company networks, which provided clearer calls, fewer disruptions, better privacy, and connections to more people within Minnesota and other states’ networks.

Long before digital transmissions, fiber optics, and cell towers, the story of rural telecommunications in Minnesota was shaped by farmers who transformed barbed wire fences into makeshift telephone lines.