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1886 – absorbed 1956
Founded: Incorporated in October 1886 by local stockholders, "for the announced purpose of providing a more extended service at a lower price than had prevailed up to that time" (Griswold). It commenced business with 800 subscribers. The telephone itself had reached Fort Wayne in 1879 under the Bell interests, whose local service the Home company largely absorbed.
Founders: Chief promoters: Charles S. Bash, William J. Vesey, Charles McCulloch, Samuel M. Foster, George W. Beers and Christian Hettler. Capital stock began at $100,000 with an equal sum in bonds, raised three years later to $250,000.
What it did: Fort Wayne's independent telephone company — local exchanges and toll lines across northeastern Indiana and beyond.
Course: In 1900 it bought the National Telephone and Telegraph Company — several Indiana, Ohio and Michigan exchanges and 1,000 miles of toll lines — paying in preferred stock. By 1917 William L. Moellering was president and general manager, Frank E. Bohn secretary. On 10 February 1927 Bohn placed the first telephone call between Fort Wayne and London, by wire and transatlantic radio.
Fate: Taken over in 1956 by the General Telephone Company of Indiana; the service passed to GTE (1984–2000), then Verizon (2000–2009), then Frontier Communications — the succession ACGSI traces for Allen County telephone service to the present.
Sources:
- B. J. Griswold, The Pictorial History of Fort Wayne, Vol. I (1917), part 57 — incorporation October 1886, promoters, capital, the 1900 purchase, officers. (One Griswold sentence elsewhere in the chapter misprints the incorporation as 1896; the detailed passage and ACGSI agree on 1886.)
- ACGSI, "Telephones," Allen County places — the 1927 London call; the 1956 General Telephone takeover; GTE, Verizon and Frontier succession.