Amsterdam’s enterprising undertaker, W. Max Reid, is credited with being a prime mover in creation of telephone service in the city.

Reid is well known as an historian for his 1901 book, “The Mohawk Valley.” He was president of the Amsterdam Board of Trade from its founding in 1884 until 1901. He found a benefactor to provide the money so that old Fort Johnson could be purchased as an historic site in 1905. Reid died in 1911. The successor to his undertaking business is the Betz, Rossi and Bellinger Family Funeral Home.

According to historian Hugh Donlon, Reid visited the Centennial Exhibition in Philadelphia in 1876 and was fascinated by the telephone exhibited there. On his return to Amsterdam, he strung wires between the casket plant in Amsterdam he had purchased from Isaac Shuler and a store in Broadalbin.

At the time, there was no signaling system and telephones only could be used by prearrangement, according to an article by Earl Stowitts of the Amsterdam Chamber of Commerce in the 1940s.

Stowitts wrote, “Twice a day at 11 a.m. and 3 p.m., the persons at each end of the line, by a process of shouting into the telephones, and then moving the same instruments to their ears to hear what was shouted back, were able to carry on a conversation over the intervening ten miles.”

Stowitts said other early phone lines were installed between the New York Central Railroad freight office and the Sanford carpet mill and Kelloggs & Miller’s linseed oil plant. Early phones also connected the homes of linseed oil magnates John, George and Lauren Kellogg.

Donlon wrote that a four-circuit line was installed in the town of Glen in 1879. He said Amsterdam phone service grew, “By 1881, the Amsterdam Telegraph and Telephone Company, locally organized, was operating a switchboard of 50 lines from a central office at East Main and Church streets.”

Another telephone pioneer, according to Stowitts, was William Charles, who operated a cotton and wool brokerage business. In 1940, Charles was still living in Amsterdam and had telephone number “1.”

Several companies competed for telephone customers in Amsterdam but after a time, competition cut the number of companies to two—the locally based Automatic Telephone Company and Hudson River Telephone, part of the growing Bell system’s national network.

Hudson River opened a new central exchange at 40 Division Street and Automatic created a new facility at 19 Pearl Street two years later. By 1910, though, the battle was over and New York Telephone—successor to Hudson River—took over phone service to some 1,500 Amsterdam customers.

Donlon wrote that in 1916, to promote long distance calling, the phone company invited 200 people to a public phone conversation at the Elks Lodge between Amsterdam Mayor James R. Cline and Mayor James Rolph of San Francisco. George Scott, exalted ruler of the Amsterdam Elks, conversed with the exalted ruler of a San Francisco lodge.

Donlon wrote, “Despite the ballyhoo, cross-country talk failed to gain immediate popularity with frugal townspeople. Rates were comparatively high and it was more economical to write a letter when speed was not particularly important.”

Stowitts includes a picture with his 1942 article showing a row of 15 seated female operators and two supervisors at the Amsterdam office of New York Telephone, then at 40 Division Street.

Stowitts wrote, “Here in a room where the only noise is the subdued murmur of operators’ voices, girls sit shoulder to shoulder at two lines of switchboards, their hands moving as swiftly and surely as a weaver’s as they plug in and remove the cords used to connect one telephone with another.”