S for Switchboard

Switchboard

Annie O’Connell worked at the telephone switchboard in the O’Connell house on the corner of Lebanon Avenue and Broadway where she was an operator for 34¹/₂ years.

In 1906, Annie O’Connell and her sister Katherine O’Connell served as telephone operators for the new switchboard installed in Colchester. Katherine was the chief operator making $10.00 per week, and left in February 1914. Annie then became the chief operator and received payments for local phone bills. Annie would also activate the siren when fire emergency number 97 rang into her switch-board. She retired in June 1941, after Southern New England Telephone built an automated switching facility on Lebanon Avenue in Colchester. She died in 1955, at 81 years of age.

The history of telephone service in Colchester begins in 1882. At that time, the Connecticut State Telephone Directory for December 1882 showed there two Colchester subscribers listed in the Norwich exchange: a pay station at H.P. Buell Drugs and the Hayward Rubber Company. From 1883 until 1906, Colchester telephones were all on party lines, connected to the Norwich exchange.

Then, on October 14, 1906, the Southern New England Telephone Company completed the installation of a new, separate telephone exchange in town. The Hartford Daily Courant reported that, “Eight hundred poles have been put up, 100 miles of open wire and two miles of serial cables have been strung for the new exchange, which is located in the center of the borough.”

“S for Switchboard” Extra Documentation

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