Twin Valley History
Company History & Background
TVT traces its beginnings to 1900 when Frederick Koster established a telephone system to connect his townhouse with the three rural ranches he owned. The following year, Koster formed Miltonvale Telephone Company – with twenty clients. Although the early history of many telephone exchanges is hard to locate, one safe guess is that around 1900, in any little community with a store, rail depot or school, several people purchased telephones and tied locations together to start a telephone company.
The years between 1901 and 1947 brought many changes to Miltonvale Telephone Company. Although the company remained in Miltonvale, the location changed often – the Shay-McArthur law office, then to the back of Bardrick Drugstore, on to the Drovers State Bank building – first the back, then the front, then back to the back again, and in 1911 – to a new building built solely for the phone company.
Earl & John Emick purchased the telephone business from Frederick Koster in 1908. Alex Ballard acquired possession in 1912. Then, in 1947, Joe and Mildred Foster purchased the Miltonvale Telephone Company. John Foster recalls the day Joe and Mildred phoned to say that they were buying the Miltonvale exchange. He and Lulu responded by asking, “Where’s that?” At the time Joe already had twenty years of work experience in the telephone industry.
Joe began his telephone career in 1917, working for Bell Telephone Company as a lineman. He was extremely young when he started work in the industry – oftentimes telling that he “couldn’t carry all the tools, but I got by.” When Joe lost his telephone work during the Depression, he got a job driving a bread truck and running a filling station at night. Eventually he found telephone work again in Concordia, Missouri, where he and Mildred lived for four years before returning to Nortonville to work again at Bell.
Soon after, Mildred saw the “for sale” ad (for the Miltonvale Telephone Company) in the paper. She later said, “I just wanted to work …and finally convinced him (Joe) to look. Joe’s boss was all for it. We knew we had to get something different. We weren’t ever going to get ahead. We were just making a living; that was it. Joe didn’t know where we’d get the money. I told him we were honest and worked hard. I knew if we couldn’t get the money – then something was wrong.”
Get the money they did – and in 1947 Joe and Mildred purchased Miltonvale Telephone Company. This was the time when the REA companies were starting up again after the war to bring electricity to rural Kansas. When lights were turned on, it brought noise to the grounded lines, making it almost impossible to carry on a conversation. So the difficult job of making the rural line metallic was begun – with a homemade digger and stringing wire from an old farm trailer.
Building telephone lines has changed over the years. In the early days, up to the end of World War II, the standard rural line was one wire, with ground being used for the other side of the line. Poles were constructed from most anything – the cheapest being a sixteen foot crooked, skinny, hard hedge pole. Cedar was the next most popular choice but cedar poles had a tendency to rot off. Almost as bad, red ants thrived in them. After the war, creosote was used to coat the poles; and oak brackets or rabbit ears held the wire. The REA program brought with it new and better standards of construction – with two pin cross arms and point transposition brackets. Steel and copper weld wire allowed for much longer span lengths.
Rural service, with eight subscribers on a line using selective ringing, was a great improvement over grounded lines where as many as nineteen or twenty subscribers shared a line. When open wire was placed underground, the size of the subscriber lines was reduced again – from eight to three or four subscribers. With the advent of filled cable and the use of smaller gauge wire, all exchanges became one-party lines.
1955 was another eventful year in the history of the company. The company converted to common battery, using a Kellogg Universal Board sold by R.A. “Bob” Stoll. Equipment salesmen like Bob were very special friends then – calling on you once a month and selling everything from batteries to wood brackets and wire.
Expansion was also in the air. A sales agreement was signed by William “Bill” Holden of Greenleaf, Kansas, and on February 27, 1957, Miltonvale and Greenleaf Telephone Companies ceased to exist and Twin Valley Telephone went into operation. Incorporators of TVT were John G., Joe, and Lulu Foster. John and Lulu had moved to Miltonvale in 1949 to help develop the growing company. In 1960, TVT purchased four more exchanges from United Telephone Company of Kansas – Barnard, Bennington, Beverly, and Tescott.
In August of 1957, Miltonvale was converted to dial. Greenleaf followed in 1959. The mid-to-late 1960’s brought direct distance dialing. In June 1990, all electromechanical switches were replaced with digital switches in all six exchanges. The switches were connected together with fiber optic cable. This change enabled technicians to do installations or to add calling features remotely. That same year, three cellular telephone cell sites were constructed for Kansas Cellular at Miltonvale, Bennington and Agenda. TVT was one of the thirty telephone companies who started Kansas Cellular. Another cellular site for Kansas Cellular was put into service at Greenleaf. In 1992, Twin Valley technicians gained valuable knowledge by repairing the first cut to the fiber optic cable south of Miltonvale. The Miltonvale exchange was isolated from long distance service until the cable was repaired later that same day. With the growth in exchanges and the need for additional phone lines, Digital Loop Carriers (DLCs) were installed. A DLC serves up to 148 customers with one fiber link. This change provided greater variety of and better services to rural customers. The first DLC was installed within the Bennington exchange in 1997. Today, TVT also offers high speed Internet and video over the telephone links.
The years have brought many changes to TVT – both through acquisitions, natural disasters, and technology. Weather has always been a factor – causing widespread damage to exposed wires and poles in the early years. Ice storms often covered a large area, sometimes fifteen to twenty counties. It seemed that about once every ten years, there was a major ice storm. As soon as the first pole would break, the effect was like dominoes.
A less common natural disaster, but as damaging, is lightning. On July 4, 2000 lightning struck the ground near Beverly, creating a hole about one foot in diameter that extended to the fiber optic cable. Cable was damaged at least twenty feet in each direction from where lightning entered the ground. Sunflowers that had been planted in the field were knocked down for an acre around the area. Eighteen hundred feet of new fiber cable had to be buried to replace the damaged cable. Damage of this extent had never been recorded in the history of the company.
Until February 2006, Twin Valley served 2,000 customers over an 850 square mile area of north central Kansas. The company was also in the process of a major acquisition. With the completion of the acquisition, the company’s customer base grew to 6,600 customers over a 2,400 square mile radius with 7,400 access lines. The acquisition consisted of adding 13 new exchanges- Aurora, Leonardville, Longford, Morganville, Riley, Wakefield, Clifton, Clyde, Delphos, Glasco, Green, Milford and Olsburg.
With the purchase of these new exchanges completed, Twin Valley began to change the infrastructure of the existing copper to fiber. Twin Valley buried fiber to each home in all 13 new exchanges. This major investment by Twin Valley in that area has allowed them to receive state-of-the-art communications and entertainment products such as high speed Internet, digital TV, high definition TV. The build out of the fiber network was completed in 2009.
In 2008, Twin Valley took on another large fiber to the home project in Clay Center. The company became a CLEC in Clay Center that provides telephone, digital TV, and high speed Internet.
Today, both third and fourth generation family members play an active role in the day-to-day management of the company. As Gerald Smith, former R.E.A. representative has said, “Joe and Mil built a success story – from a small company into one of the best in Kansas. They built a heritage that will go on for generations.” Doug Hansen, a telephone equipment supplier to the company, describes today’s company as “a unique operation, with the number of family members involved. Not many could do that. It’s because of the people leading it”.
