In 1990, a rural Idaho community of 17 homes made one final phone call. It marked the end of America's last known hand-cranked telephone system

For years, people living deep in Idaho’s Salmon River canyon had a telephone system that seemed to belong to another time. There were no numbers to punch and no private lines. If residents wanted to make a call, they turned a crank and listened for the familiar ring. Then, in July 1990, that system finally went silent.

The community’s old hand-cranked party line was disconnected and replaced by private-line, touch-tone service. According to The Los Angeles Times, it was the nation’s last known operating hand-cranked, party-line telephone system.

A phone line running through the wilderness

The system served a small group of families scattered through the remote Salmon River canyon. The Washington Post reported that the 20-party single line stretched for about 40 miles, with parts of it running along trees, fence posts and steep cliffs.


Idaho Magazine later reported that 17 households were actually using the line by the time it was retired.

The system had been around since the Depression era. It was originally installed by the U.S. Forest Service in 1931 and was later bought by a resident cooperative, North Fork Telephone Corp., for $1 in 1952, according to The Washington Post.

The phones themselves had no dial. A user would turn a magneto crank to produce an electrical signal and a coded ringing pattern. That allowed one household to call another on the shared line, while a different ring could signal the operator in Salmon for calls outside the canyon.

Everyone on the party line knew the arrangement came with some inconvenience. People could hear the phone ringing whenever somebody else made a call, and only one conversation could take place at a time.

The system was old, but it mattered

The telephone line was much more than an outdated piece of equipment for the people who lived there.

The remote canyon could be difficult to reach, particularly when snow, rockslides or other problems blocked roads. The telephone provided an important connection between scattered homes and the outside world.

The line also had a distinctly personal side. Local operators in Salmon knew the residents and sometimes helped with everyday matters. The Los Angeles Times reported that operators had even helped residents with things such as getting baseball scores and making sure family members had remembered to call home.

But maintaining the old system was becoming increasingly difficult. The lines could be damaged by lightning, fires, avalanches and rockslides. Residents themselves sometimes had to climb steep terrain to make repairs.

By 1990, newer telephone technology was clearly taking over.

The final call

The end came when the old system was replaced by private-line, touch-tone service. The Los Angeles Times reported that Garry Pedrow, owner of the Shoup Country Store, answered the first incoming call on the new system.

“I’m not screaming anymore,” Pedrow said.

The change was welcomed for practical reasons, but there was also a feeling that something familiar was disappearing.

Idaho Magazine records a more symbolic moment from the transition. In July 1990, about 50 people gathered at the Shoup Store, where John Booker, who owned the former Outpost general store and burger grill, made what the magazine describes as the final call on the nation’s last-known magneto hand-cranked telephone system.

The old phones had finally given way to a modern system.

For most Americans, a touch-tone telephone was nothing unusual by then. In this isolated corner of Idaho, however, the change meant the end of a way of communicating that had survived long after hand-cranked phones had disappeared almost everywhere else.

The crank was gone, the party line was over, and the canyon had finally joined the modern telephone network.