LincTel celebrates centenary

The Lincoln Telephone Company – now known as LincTel - welcomed community members to a public barbecue at Hooper Park Thursday Afternoon, July 22 to celebrate 100 years of telephone service to Lincoln.

The laid-back celebration featured plenty of food and activities for the kids, and drew in guests throughout the afternoon.

One hundred years ago, when many of the telephones in the state still used barbed wire fences to make calls, the Helena Commercial Club saw the value in running a phone line between Lincoln and Helena.

In September, 1921, they authorized anegotiation with Mountain States Telephone to extend their line three miles from Marysville to Canyon Creek. From there they could run a line up to Lincoln, and connect the ranches along the way.

By Sept 23, 1921, they had raised stock subscriptions in the new Helena and Lincoln Telephone Company amounting to $2350 in cash and labor from Lincoln residents, Helena businessmen and ranchers for constructing of the new telephone line.

On Sept. 25, the Helena Independent Record reported that articles of incorporation for the company had been drawn up, and on Sept. 27 the first five temporary directors of the new company were elected at a meeting in Lincoln to incorporate the company.

A week later, on Oct. 2, permanent directors were elected, with Len Lambkin serving as the first president. Ray Hooper was elected vice president, Paul Didriksen retained his position as secretary and AT Hibbard was selected as treasurer.

Construction work on the new phone line began in early October, 1921, with help from Charles Larson, described as an "experienced forest telephone line builder", and from a manager with Mountain States Telephone named Whittinghill, who offered the aid of his engineering and plant department.

According to 'Goldpans and Singletrees,' the original line, with some 3000 pounds of wire supplied by the Helena Hardware company and poles cut by Ray Hooper for 45 cents an hour, ran to a switch at Rosencrantz's at Canyon Creek and tied in with Canyon Creek's farmers' line telephone company, which connected to Helena over the Lincoln line.

The original line lasted until 1953, when dial telephones finally began to replace the old system, which relied on a series of long and short rings to connect to the right person on ten-party lines. The new dial exchange went into service Nov. 1, 1954. At the time, the seven digit numbers began with the prefix EMpire 2. A Helena IR article indicates the system started with just three telephones but had grown to 55 in Lincoln and 18 in Canyon Creek by 1953.

George Stoner, the manager at the time, and 'combinationman' George Lantis, installed 12,000 feet of new phone line and built an asbestos sided building to house the digital switching equipment at the current site of the LincTel offices.

By the mid 1960's, when Bob Orr came to Lincoln, Stoner had retired and Thelma Hines, Stoner's daughter, managed the telephone company.

At the time, despite dial service, ten party lines were still the order of the day.

"Then we had private lines, except the stuff that was way out of town, then it was four-party," Orr told the BVD at last weeks celebration.

Orr, who had worked on a Mountain Bell construction crew before coming to Lincoln handled the "outside work," but eventually took over as manager.

He said they also added cable television to their services during his tenure.

"We had two channels. One was in Butte, one was in Great Falls," he said. "There were some people who could get TV on an antenna but there were a lot who couldn't. It seemed like something people really did like."

In fact, The Lincoln Telephone company was one of the last communications company in the state to abandon cable TV service on Dec. 31, 2019, it still offers telephone services to more than 550 customers in Lincoln, as well as a full fiber optic broadband internet access and over-the-top streaming services.

The decision to move from copper line to fiber optic dates back about a decade, and the first work on fiber optic lines began back in 2013, when Lincoln Telephone installed 17 miles of conduit from Highway 279 to the office in Lincoln. Work to connect all their subscribers to fiber finally got underway in earnest in 2018, thanks to a USDA Rural Utility Service Loan. The three year installation projected connected all their subscribers to fiber optic and puts Lincoln ahead of most other rural areas in the state, which are still the focus of rural broadband efforts.

Although LincTel, the latest iteration of the original Helena-Lincoln Telephone company, is a far cry from its origins, Aaron Daniel, LincTel's current general manager, said it is one of the oldest phone companies still in business that hasn't sold out to a larger company.

"We can brag about that," he said.

The change with the times is exemplified by the new LincTel logo, which Daniel said has been around for about four years but wasn't formally adopted until a couple years ago, after they changed the Lincoln Telephone Company incorporation and created LincTel as a subsidiary.

"I'm gonna give all the credit to my son, Bryce," Daniel said. "Bryce got with a company that does logos. They started looking at it. They wanted a design that brought us into the future. He started with the digital fish, and Lincoln's known for the Blackfoot River, so that is how we came up with it.