ST. GEORGE — ​Today with smartphones and the internet, it’s hard to imagine a time when the world wasn’t at our fingertips. Yet it was not that long ago when it took days to get news outside our hometowns, or when we might have used a barbed wire fence to make a telephone call if we lived on a farm.

It wasn’t until the late 19th century that Alexander Graham Bell invented the telegraph and telephone that folks had options other than ink on paper or a face-to-face visit.

​In the early days before the telegraph or telephone, Nephi Johnson and his brothers carried the mail by horseback to and from Kanab over the circuitous Schunesburg Trail. It included a 1,500-foot scramble on a narrow footpath down a cliff where they exchanged mail sacks with their counterpart from Toquerville.

It wasn’t a job for the faint of heart, but it was the only way at the time to get your mail. The job was eventually made a little easier when Joe Hamblin of Kanab figured out how to exchange mail sacks over a sheer cliff in Zion Canyon using a wire cable attached to a windlass.

​In the 1860s, the Deseret Telegraph Company enlisted men to stitch together telegraph lines across the state. The telegraph reached Washington and Kane Counties within a few years and young women were encouraged to learn the Morse Code and become telegraphers.

Fifteen-year-old Ella Stewart of Kanab learned telegraphy under the tutelage of Sarah Spilsbury at Toquerville. Her first assignment, in 1871, was to operate the branch line at Pipe Springs, Arizona, which became the first telegraph office in Arizona Territory. She then moved back home where she ran the Kanab telegraph office for many years.

​People had to rely on the telegraph service for urgent messages until the early 1900s, when rudimentary telephone service finally came to southern Utah. Telephone lines reached Parowan and Cedar City in the summer of 1903, although it took a few years before telephones caught on with folks. By 1905 a branch telephone line reached Enoch, just north of Cedar City.

William H. Grimshaw was a clever man who decided he’d like to have a telephone at his farm northwest of Enoch. But the phone company was charging more than he was willing to pay for a connection, so he used his barbed wire fence as a telephone line, an idea he’d known had been used elsewhere. Roads and gateways were no obstacle as he simply raised a tall pole on each side using beer bottles on top of each pole as insulators.

When Grimshaw sought out John Woodbury, manager of the phone company, wanting to get a telephone, he was met with skepticism. Woodbury told him he’d have to pay the monthly rental fee whether his barbed wire contraption worked or not. Undaunted, Grimshaw had the phone installed and rang the switchboard operator, Arbella Jones, who answered, “Number please?”

“This is William H. Grimshaw on Linger Longer Lane talking on the barbed wire fence,” he replied.

The shocked Jones replied, “You can’t be. Your voice is coming in as clear as can be.”

Grimshaw was pleased with himself and was soon enlisted to help other Midvalley farmers create their own barbed wire telephone lines.

Another innovation near the same time was Emile Berlinger’s marvelous Victrola “talking machine,” which was later bought out by RCA Victor. It could be had for as little as $15 and was a marvel of the age. Sarah and Arthur Cox of Orderville bought one in 1910 that family and friends alike enjoyed; perhaps too much.

“All the folks have gone to Sarah’s to hear the phonograph,” Kezia Esplin wrote to her son who was out with the sheep on the Arizona Strip. The Esplin girls were apparently spending so much time listening to music that they were staying up all hours of the night. “It is nearly ten o’clock and bedtime for me. It is washday tomorrow and we ought to get up early.”

The real breakthrough, however, came in the early 1920s when miracle of miracles, you could actually listen to music over the airwaves. It seemed almost like magic as both KSL-AM in Salt Lake City and KNX-AM in Los Angeles broadcast on 50,000-watt clear channel frequencies which could easily be heard in the evening in Southern Utah.

Youngsters anxious to hear the latest music, or lonely herders on the range wanting to hear something other than bleating sheep, could have some company in their lonely sheep wagons. I remember my own grandfather after dinner at our ranch on Cedar Mountain listening to KNX on his old AM radio powered by a car battery. I think it was his way of having a little company, since he was alone most of the time.

Today, in a world of Tik Tok, Instagram, Snapchat and instantaneous access to global news, these antiquated forms of communications seem hopelessly out-of-date. But there is still something to be said for a good visit sitting around the kitchen table or a carefully-crafted, well-written letter, even if it takes a day or two to reach its destination.

Editor’s note: Sources for this article include Elsie Chamberlain Carroll’s 1960 “History of Kane County,” Janet Burton Seegmiller’s 1998 “History of Iron County,” the on-line archives of the Washington County Historical Society and Family Memories in FamilySearch.org.

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