Editor’s note: This is another column in Bill Boyd’s new series, “The Way It Was,” about growing up in Marysville. Bill continues to work with the Union County Historical Society to obtain information for his stories. With Marysville and Union County celebrating Bicentennial anniversaries in 2019 and 2020, respectively, these articles help depict what life was like in those early years.
–––
In 1861, America’s first transcontinental telegraph line was completed. The line made it possible for someone in Washington D.C. to communicate with someone in San Francisco. It was an amazing communications breakthrough.
Eighty years or so later, I think it was in 1943, another telegraph line was built right here in Marysville. It wasn’t as long as the transcontinental line, but it ran all the way from Bert Sawyer’s tree house at the corner of Fourth and Cedar Streets to Richard Liggett’s house on South Maple, where the parking lot behind Dave’s Pharmacy is located today. I bet that was the only tree house in the country with a telegraph line.
I think the whole thing was Bert’s idea. He was always fooling around with electricity and radios and things like that. Besides, there were times when he might be in his tree house and he suddenly needed to get in touch with Richard. A direct telegraph line would be perfect. So those two boys decided to build one.
Richard’s dad provided the wire to run the line, and the boys found a couple of old railroad telegraph keys. So they went right to work.
They didn’t use telegraph poles to support the wire. Instead, the line ran from tree to tree. It went through several maple trees, and one medium size elm. It also went through the big pear tree in our front yard, and the apple tree in the backyard of the Robb sisters, our next-door neighbors.
The boys used a variety of techniques to string the wire. Sometimes they used a ladder. Other times they simply climbed the tree. But they used a different technique to run the wire through our pear tree. That was the biggest pear tree I ever saw. It was just as tall as our maple trees. I was too young to be of help, so I just sat on our front porch steps and watched them.
They tied a long length of twine to a rock, about the size of a baseball. Then they threw the rock over a tree limb. The rock’s weight let it fall to the ground, pulling the length of twine with it. The other end of the twine was attached to the wire, so they simply pulled on the twine to run the wire through the tree. And so it went, from tree to tree, with each tree dictating the procedure used to continue the line.
This all sounds a lot easier than it actually was, for it took several days to complete the line. I never knew how well the telegraph line worked, so not long ago I thought I would try to contact Bert Sawyer. With the help of Nancy Katzenbach at the Union County Genealogical Society, I found him, living in California.
It was fun to relive some of those old boyhood memories, and I asked him how well the telegraph line worked. He told me the line worked just fine, but he had underestimated the difficulty of using the Morse code. He said it was a simple matter to memorize the dots and dashes of the code’s alphabet, but it took a long time to become proficient using it.
In fact, if he was in a hurry to get a message to Richard, I think it would have been faster for him to climb down out of the tree house and walk to Richard’s house and talk to him. That’s how difficult it was to use the code.
But I think that telegraph line was worth all the effort. You see, it was long before television, computer games and smart phones. So things like building a telegraph line were just what a lot of boys did to have fun. And both Bert and Richard certainly had fun. Yes, it was a great time to be a kid in Marysville.
Those wishing to contact Bill Boyd can e-mail him at bill@davidwboyd.com