Powell Liberty Historical Society

During most of the 20th century, an anomaly of America’s landline telephone system divided the Liberty Township community, shaping friendships and commerce in ways its residents rarely stopped to examine. An invisible line — precise, bureaucratic — ran down the center of Seldom Seen Road from the Scioto to the Olentangy. Calling across that boundary was difficult, time-consuming. and expensive.

Dial telephones and free local calling revolutionized personal communications that century. For a fixed monthly fee — around four dollars a month mid-century — you could instantly com-municate and interact with a neighbor, a merchant, or a friend in your community. All you had to do was pick up the phone and dial a few digits. In seconds you were speaking with the person you wanted to speak with, or with someone who could go and find them and bring them to the telephone. You could talk as long as you wanted and dial as many local calls as you wanted for that fixed monthly fee.

But that anomaly dividing Liberty Township was an impediment to this novel and virtually fric-tion-free method of communications. A neighbor, a friend, or a merchant on the other side of that artificial boundary could not be reached by dialing. And they could not be reached for free. The telephone companies had drawn a line, and you were either on one side of it or the other. To call across that boundary, you had to dial zero and wait for an operator to answer. She — tel-ephone operators were exclusively women until the 1972 Equal Employment Opportunity Act changed the practice — she saw a light flashing at a jack on her switchboard, picked up a cord, plugged in, pulled the talk switch, and answered your call with one word, “Operator.” That sin-gle word both announced who you had reached, and inquired as to how she could complete your call. You responded without preamble, simply stating the name of the town you wanted to reach and the number. “Delaware,” you said: “2-3456.” Efficiency, courtesy, and speed were the goals of this transaction. She wrote the town and number down on a paper ticket, repeated it back to you, and asked you for your number so she could charge you for the call. Your number was right there on the center of the telephone dial. You said it, she wrote it down and concluded the exchange with a “thank you” and began the task of connecting your call. With the other end of the cord, the operator started tapping the edge of each jack on a row of jacks that were labeled “Delaware.” If she heard a click in her headset, she tapped the next one and continued until she found one that did not click. No click meant that the trunk was not oc-cupied and she pushed the jack all the way in. Then she pushed a rocker switch on her shelf to signal for an operator in Delaware. You heard nothing, not even the clicks, just indistinct back-ground chatter — the voices of other operators working their calls. And then the distant opera-tor answered “Delaware.” and you knew she had gotten to the right town. You said nothing. Your operator said “Columbus calling,” and gave the second operator the number you gave her. The second operator repeated the number and said, “one moment.” You heard dial-tone for an instant before it cut out as she dialed the number you could not dial yourself.

You heard this interaction between the operators and knew to keep quiet while it occurred. Fi-nally, you heard the distant telephone ringing. The operators were still on the line with you. You and the two operators were all waiting for the call to be answered. When you heard the person you were calling say “Hello?” it was finally your turn to speak. As you replied to the hello the distant operator rocked your cord’s talk switch and silently dropped off the call. But the local operator, the one you had spoken with, she had one more task to do. She put the ticket she had been writing in a punch-clock to stamp the start time of the call on it and then she rocked your talk switch to drop off your line as she picked up another cord to handle the next blinking light. When you were finished talking and hung up, a lamp started blinking for your cords at both switchboards, and as each operator noticed them, they pulled out the cords that had connected your call. One last task: the operator you spoke with stamped the ticket with the end time and set it aside for billing. The charge? Twenty cents for each three minutes of talk. It would appear on your next telephone bill. Twenty cents was not an insignificant amount in the 1940s, ‘50s and ‘60s. This meant that while you were talking, you had to worry about hanging up before the three minutes were up or your call was going to be a 40-cent call. The operator was not going to interrupt you. The equipment in those days was not capable of beeping or buzzing when three minutes were up. This meant that toll calls were never leisurely calls. You were keeping an eye on a clock or watch as you car-ried on the conversation. Some people used the kitchen timer. When it dinged, you, in mid-sentence, immediately said “goodbye!” and hung up. But wait, that 20 or 40 or 60 cent call was subject to a 10% federal tax on long distance calls (down from 25% during World War II) so it was really a 22 cent charge for each three minutes of talk. (That tax, imposed by Congress on long distance charges in 1898 to fund the Spanish-American War, was never rescinded. It lasted until 2006.) Compare that 22 cent charge with these typical 1958 prices: a loaf of bread was 19 cents; a gal-lon of gas, 24 cents; a postage stamp, four cents; and a 15½-oz can of Chef Boy-Ar-Dee spaghetti was 19 cents. A one-pound box of Nabisco saltines was 25 cents, and a 17-oz can of Libby’s peaches, 25 cents.

You could have a leisurely, care-free call with a neighbor or friend on your side of the township’s telephone company territory boundary, but not when calling a neighbor or friend on the other side. Unless you were rich, those toll calls had to be quick verbal transactions. ——— How did this artificial boundary come about and how did it come to divide the township? The short answer is that that boundary was a telephone company territory line and it was placed along that road based on which telephone company had gotten their lines there first, and which telephone company was the better-financed and more persistent negotiator with the Public Utilities Commission when territory lines were officially finalized and mapped in the 1930s and ’40s. Landline telephone service in the United States is provided by private for-profit companies that were granted territorial monopolies by the federal government and state regulators. To the south of the telephone territory boundary were the wires of The Ohio Bell Telephone Company, a wholly-owned AT&T subsidiary. To the north, the wires of the Northern Ohio Telephone Com-pany, a small independent telephone company headquartered in Bellevue, Ohio. Nationwide mid-20th century, there were some 2000 for-profit telephone companies and an-other 4000 or so rural telephone cooperatives providing telephone service within their territo-ries. 22 of them were owned by AT&T and those 22 —the “Bell System” — had 83% of the na-tion’s telephone subscribers. The other 17% were served by what were known as independent telephone companies. Liberty Township found itself straddling two telephone company territories, the Bell System to the south, and an “independent” to the north. The reason you could call across that territory boundary at all was the result of government regulatory and commercial pressure. The compa-nies were making good money in their territories. Revenue from edge communities such as Powell and Hyatts in Liberty Township — and nearby Ostrander, Plain City, Lewis Center and Ga-lena — was a drop in the bucket to Ma Bell. Figuring out how to smooth the burrs suffered by edge communities like ours was not worth their time and effort.

Residential telephone service in the 20th century was remarkably cheap because it was subsi-dized by much more expensive business telephone service (the same wire was more expensive when used by a business, and businesses paid for each call they made). AT&T also made signifi-cant money on long distance service and split it with the independents when the call originated or terminated on their equipment. And all phone companies hauled in advertising revenue from the ubiquitous yellow pages, typically the biggest section of each local telephone directory. This orderly, regulated, and uncompetitive state of affairs meant that residential telephone ser-vice was cheap in the 20th century, and it all fell apart early in the 21st with the advent of cell-phones and the internet. But in the 20th century, for a flat rate you got a residential line and one telephone — you could rent more phones for a little bit more— and you could place unlimited local calls and talk as long as you wanted without paying a penny extra. One burr that bedeviled Liberty Township was the boundary that defined “local calls.” Another was the technical limitation of dialing across incompatible dialing equipment. AT&T’s Bell Labs invented radar, microwave transmission and the transistor, but AT&T was in no hurry to give its competition a hand by improving interconnections.

The telephone territory boundary that split Liberty Township, the solid black line on the map above, crosses the Scioto River at the western edge of the township and runs east first along Seldom Seen Road, then north on Liberty Road to Rutherford Road, then east through woods and fields — bisecting today’s Carriage Road subdivision — all the way to the Olentangy River. The boundary then follows the river south to Powell Road and then east again along Powell Road until it enters Orange Township. Orange Township is also divided by the boundary, and when the boundary line reaches Westerville, it loops north to keep all of Westerville in Ohio Bell territory. So if you lived in the little railroad town of Powell, Ohio Bell’s telephone poles passed by your house. If you lived in Hyatts, one train station north, Northern Ohio’s telephone poles passed by your house. You couldn’t pick your telephone company like you can today for cellphone ser-vice—the telephone company picked you. If you wanted telephone service at your home or place of business, the wire normally came from the nearest pole.

Now back to that $4/mo rate for telephone service that entitled you to unlimited talk in the lo-cal calling area. Liberty Township’s problem: it was in two different local calling areas. Tele-phones south of Seldom Seen Road were in Ohio Bell’s Columbus local calling area while tele-phones north of Seldom Seen Road were in Northern Ohio’s Delaware local calling area. The Columbus calling area was huge. It included the city and many of its suburbs—Westerville, Ca-nal Winchester, Grove City and many more. The Delaware local calling area not so much. Sur-prisingly, the Delaware local calling area did not include the whole of Delaware County. While it included Lewis Center and Radnor, it omitted Sunbury and Galena. You got more bang for your $4 if you were with Ohio Bell.

2026 photo by the author 6. Seldom Seen Road, the Dividing Line. Verizon pole and a single black cable filled with telephone lines is on the right. American Electric Power pole on the left with its power lines at the top. AT&T’s black telephone cable is the lowest. Spec-trum’s silver cable-TV lines are above AT&T’s cable. AT&T’s and Veri-zon’s fiberoptic internet lines are in the ground on their respective side of the roadway.

But the real problem was that the two calling areas did not overlap. There was no free calling between the two different phone companies. You had to pay the three minute rate to call between the two halves of the township — 20 cents for every 3 minutes you were connected, plus the 10% tax. And until the mid 1960s you could not dial across that boundary yourself. You had to wait for an operator to place the call for you. As Columbus grew and its suburbs pushed further and further out, that calling area boundary running from Plain City to Westerville became an impediment to new development. After all, you could not live where you could not call home from work to say you would be late for supper. Northern Ohio and Ohio Bell, prodded by the Public Utilities Commission which was being prodded by the housing industry, came up with a solution: Northern Ohio would build a new exchange near the little hamlet of Rathbone and rewire the central parts of Liberty and most of Concord Township to it. Their engineers would figure out how to connect the Rathbone exchange to both the Columbus local calling area and the Delaware local calling area, a novel idea back then. When they inaugurated service, Rathbone telephones could dial across the telephone company territory boundary for free, and Columbus calling area telephones could call Rathbone telephones for free.

That new Rathbone exchange, inaugurated in 1961 with its feet in both calling areas (and Northern Ohio’s neighboring Cheshire exchange in the Lewis Center area of Orange Township, reconfigured like Rathbone along with the Plain City exchange) made possible the development of the housing subdivisions that define Powell, Jerome, and Lewis Center today. It needs noting that until 1988, Rathbone subscribers had to dial 7 and wait for another dial tone before dialing a Columbus local number, but the call was free. (Powell phones did not dial a 7 first to reach Rathbone, they just needed to dial the seven digits.) It looks like Northern Ohio went the cheap route with the dialing equipment they used to reach Ohio Bell’s lines, and one narrative (see the Carriage Road Story below) indicated that calling Columbus — and therefore Ohio Bell subscribers in Powell — was not reliable due to busy signals well into the 1990s. The Rathbone Exchange moved the toll boundary that separated the township from Seldom Seen Road 3½ miles north to Hyatts Road (see map in illustration 5). The township was still sepa-rated communications-wise, but the more populated southern half of the township was finally seamlessly connected.

They say that many a lifetime friendship begins at school. Today teenagers are constantly texting and DM’ing each other, with just the occasional voice call. Back in the last century your only choice was the telephone, or you waited for the next school day to say hello. A common refrain from your parents: “please get off the phone right now, I’m expecting an important call!”—no call waiting tones back then; if you were on the line, everyone else got a busy signal.

And then the phone bill arrived. At 22 cents for each 3 minutes of talk, long distance charges could easily double or triple the $4 base rate with teenagers in the house. “You can’t spend so much time on the phone with Sally, the charges for last month’s long distance are through the roof!” The first reprimand applied to all of the teenager’s friends, but the second one discriminated. How many budding friendships at Powell High School and later at Olentangy High School cooled because of communications restrictions? Commerce discrimination had the same financial and dialing difficulty components, and it had a third. Ohio Bell customers got a Columbus phonebook every year while Northern Ohio customers got the Delaware phone book. Need a plumber? There was a list of them in the yellow pages, and some had big ads there to catch your eye. Toothache? Call around until you found a dentist who could see you immediately — the yellow pages listed dentists too. And auto parts dealers, and hardware stores. Every trade and profession was in the yellow pages. Whoever was in your phone book got your call. Whoever wasn’t, didn’t.

Delaware, Ohio, Yellow Pages 10. Dentists in the 1960 Delaware Yellow Pages

The lists and ads in the yellow pages of the two directories were different. Callers from the northern part of the township ended up spending their money in Delaware. Callers from the southern part spent their money in Dublin, Worthington or Westerville. (Savvy Rathbone subscribers asked to receive both directories in order to have more options.) This community division was not unique to Liberty Township. It occurred in local calling area edge communities all over Ohio and across the nation, and telephone subscribers continually made their displeasure known. Switching equipment improved in the 1960s allowing “short distance” toll calls like the ones across Liberty Township’s territory boundary to be dialed directly and timed and billed automatically. That smoothed the first impediment edge communities suffered, but you still paid 20+ cents if you called across that line. Specific to our township, the 1960s Rathbone exchange discussed earlier solved the dialing and toll problem for the lower two thirds of the township, enabling the development of the township from a rural to a suburban one. Then in 1987 an Extended Local Calling Plan became available from Ohio Bell — with GTE, Northern Ohio’s successor, making one available by 1992. In this latter year the artificial communications boundary that bedeviled the township completely disappeared, because for a few dollars more per month, these plans granted free calling across the boundary. With these plans, Delaware subscribers could now call into Columbus, and therefore to Powell for free, and Powell subscribers could call Delaware for free.

11. In the 1970s Touch-Tone Telephones Could be Rented for a Small Monthly Upcharge This is an Ohio Bell model*.

Two of Liberty Township’s three communications impediments present since the advent of the telephone had finally been breached completely. The third, the different telephone directories from the two phone companies, lingered into the first few years of the 21st century, and then Google Search and Google Maps killed off the need for telephone directories world-wide. The artificial communications boundary imposed on Liberty Township in the 20th century intro-duced friction to friendships and biased commerce. Older residents who lived on either side of Seldom Seen Road remember it, even if they never had a name for it. That artifact of telephone landline monopolies is now history. The phone in your pocket today freely and effortlessly lets you follow your friends and expand your commerce across any and all boundaries nationwide — at no additional charge. ### Stay tuned for the Carriage Road story on page 14!

space holder for tables

What is scheduled to end in 2029 is something that began with Bell’s first successful transmis-sion of voice in 1876: the unbroken analog electrical journey of the human voice converted from sound to electricity at the mouthpiece, and back again at the earpiece — with nothing in between but metal wire. With just a trickle of battery voltage and wire, your voice could travel hundreds of miles without electronic amplification. These same principles continued to be the method of transmission along copper wires strung along Liberty Township’s roads until 2029.

Liberty Township Telephone Facts

• Basic copper-wire telephones have no electronics in them; they are electrical instru-ments. They need no local power to operate. The smarts that connect calls and ring bells are in the telephone company central-office building some distance away, so each tele-phone’s wires has to travel uninterrupted all the way to the central office.
• • Today, copper-wire landlines west of the railroad tracks and south of Seldom Seen Road runs 8 or so miles from each telephone to AT&T’s dialing equipment in a large window-less building on Shier Rings Road in Dublin — thousands of them inside thick black ca-bles you see hanging on poles by the side of the road.
• Copper-wire landlines east of the tracks and south of part of Carriage Road run some 7 miles to a building on New England Avenue in Worthington where more of AT&T’s dial-ing equipment is located.
• Copper-wire landlines between Seldom Seen Road and Hyatts Road run to Verizon’s dial-ing equipment in a small windowless cinderblock building on Home Road at the traffic circle with Section Line Road. That building is apparently very well built —over the years many a distracted driver missed the stop sign at that T-intersection before the traffic cir-cle was built, smashing into the building without disrupting telephone service.
• •Copper-wire landlines north of Hyatts Road run to Verizon’s dialing equipment in a building on Sandusky Street in downtown Delaware.
• In 1997 friction between the two halves of the township was reintroduced when GTE customers got a new area code, 740; Ohio Bell customers kept their 614 area code. GTE customers could still dial their local calling area with just 7 digits, but had to dial 10 dig-its—the area code and number—to call across the Seldom Seen territory boundary. Likewise for Ohio Bell customers, who continued with 7-digit dialing to other telephones on their side, but needed to dial 10 digits to cross the boundary. The territory boundary had reared its ugly head again! This disparity continued until 2016 when 10-digit dialing (area code plus local number) was required to reach any and all numbers in central Ohio.

“Telephone Service Would be Nice” — The Carriage Road Story

The tony Carriage Road neighborhood, located off Olentangy River Road in Delaware County's Liberty Township, was platted in the early 1960s as the Westchester Subdivision, but building did not begin in earnest until the 1980s and continued into the 1990s. The telephone company territory boundary cuts right through the neighborhood left to right. Some homes are in one territory, and others in the other. Until 1992 Northern Ohio customers had to dial 7 first to cross the boundary, but Ohio Bell cus-tomers did not. A lot of times that 7 got you an immediate busy signal, which the report below alludes to. And between 1997 and 2016 a new annoyance: You dialed area code plus the num-ber to call some neighbors and just the 7-digit number to call others, and both calls were local calls. Dial it wrong and you got a recording berating you for your error.

The following quoted text is from the 2010 book 8060 Olentangy River Road Delaware Ohio 43015 by Steven Conliff et al.

Telephone Service Would Be Nice. The nearly solid limestone layers lurking under the properties discouraged a number of potential buyers in the following years. The geology also caused problems with the tele-phone installation. The restrictions established for the development called for all utili-ties to be underground except along the rear of the property. Suppliers wanted nothing to do with the installation problems involved. The telephone boundary between Ohio Bell and Northern Ohio Telephone ran right down Rutherford Road and east into the new development. Ohio Bell wouldn't serve these new homes because they said it was not their territory; Northern Ohio (GTE) would not incur the expense to bring a phone line this far south. Finally, Ohio Bell, thanks to Chapman's contacts with the contractor involved, managed to trench conduits through the limestone from Olentangy River Road halfway through the development.

From that midway point, the development swung to the north and into Northern Ohio Telephone territory. Property owners in this northwestern section recall going 5 years without a phone because Northern Ohio, out of Norwalk, refused to put the utilities un-derground in the easements which ran across the back of the properties. Jim Rush, one of the original residents on Wren Lane, along with Bill Kramer, adamantly and persistent-ly insisted that phone service be supplied, so out of apparent exasperation, Northern Ohio came through and slapped in a series of small, single poles every 100 ft. or so, with a couple of wires, about the dimension of a little finger, right across the fronts of the properties. At this point Northern Ohio announced that they were ready to put in Rush's phone. Rush inquired if they were aware that utilities were to be underground according to papers filed at the courthouse. They declared they had no intention of putting the line underground. Apparently, it was 5 more years before phone service was supplied through a compromise between Northern Ohio and Olentangy River Realty. Northern Ohio agreed they would furnish the cable and drop the cable into the trench if Olen-tangy River Realty would dig the trench. Four- to five-thousand feet of trenching later, the phones were installed. Ohio Bell and Ohio Northern maintained that the line between their two services ran due east and west. Carriage Road and its homes meandered sometimes to the north and sometimes to the south of this line. Thus, approximately 50% of the development was Ohio Bell and 50% Ohio Northern. Maggie Webb, one of our historians and a homeown-er since 1981, recalls that making phone calls in those days could elicit tears of exasper-ation – deciding who lived in which service area was nearly impossible and getting through to the Columbus area at all was totally unreliable. And history does repeat itself, as find we development divided between two area codes once again!

###

Found in the 1922 Delaware Telephone Directory:

“Dial 0 to report a fire. The operator will attempt to call your neighbors for you.”

Sources:

1. Public Utilities Commission of Ohio, Interactive Web Mapping Application, https://puco.ohio.gov/utilities/telecom/service-area-map, accessed May 24, 2026.
2. Federal Communications Commission, Antenna Structure Registration (ASR) database, https://wireless2.fcc.gov/UlsApp/AsrSearch/asrRegistrationSearch.jsp accessed May 25, 2026.
3. Local Calling Guide North America Numbering Plan Rate Centre database, https://localcallingguide.com/index.php, accessed May 25, 2026.
4. Telephone Directories from each of the telephone companies named in this essay for the years 1913 (the earliest found) to 1995, in the archives of the Ohio History Connection, the Delaware County Historical Society, The Delaware County District Library, the Columbus Metropolitan Library, and the Old Worthington Public Library. There were numerous gaps in years available for earlier directories.
5. Memorial.BellSystem.com — Life in the Bell System. https://memorial.bellsystem.com/lifebellsystem.htm, accessed June 15, 2026
6. Answering the Call of Automation, by James Feigenbaum and Daniel P. Gross. Nov 2020 revised Feb 2024. https://www.nber.org/system/files/working_papers/w28061/w28061.pdf
7. A History of Engineering & Science in the Bell System: Switching Technology 1925-1975, G.E. Schindler, Jr., editor. Published 1982 by Bell Telephone Laboratories, Inc.
8. Bell System Practices, some of which are at http://bellsystempractices.org/
9. 8060 Olentangy River Road Delaware Ohio 43015 by Steven Conliff et al. 2010 self-published soft cover book, available at the Delaware County District Library Local History Room.
10. Delaware County (Ohio) Auditor GIS Property Search at https://auditor.delco-gis.org/, ac-cessed June 16, 2026.
11. Bureau of Labor Statistics, Employment and Earnings, monthly, 1958, via fra-ser.stlouisfed.org.
12. Federal Communications Commission, Memorandum Opinion and Order, FCC 19-72, WC Docket No. 18-141, 34 FCC Rcd 6503 (adopted July 26, 2019; released Aug. 2, 2019).