The Boy Who Wired Bradenton

Long before telephone poles lined Bradenton's streets, the city's first phone line was held aloft by pine trees and insulated with broken beer bottles.

And somehow, the darn thing worked.

The unlikely contraption was the work of two people whose names belong together in the story of Manatee County's first telephone system: a young Jack B. Leffingwell (remember him from last week?) and a talented Black lineman named Alec Richardson, according to a first hand historical interview with Jack conducted by the Manatee County Historical Society.

As we learned last week, the  story begins when Jack’s grandfather, Gen. Hiram W. Leffingwell, arrived in Ellenton from St. Louis in 1878 with, among other things, a boxcar load of surplus No. 12 copper field telegraph wire left over from the Civil War. Hiram planned to use the wire to fence his vineyards.

Above: Jack Leffingwell on his peddle boat. He saw himself as an inventor. 

For years, the wire sat around Ellenton, gradually disappearing as neighbors found other uses for it. In 1893, Jack's father, Dr. John Brooks Leffingwell, salvaged what remained and hauled it by barge across the Manatee River to Braidentown, as he had other plans for it. 

Dr. Leffingwell operated a drug store and post office located at the present-day 300 block of 13th St. W. His family lived at Point Pleasant, then known as Curry's Point.

The distance between the two wasn't enormous, but Jack later recalled that the house was too far away to "whoop or holler" to the drug store.

The doctor needed a better solution and it just so happened that he’d recently employed remarkably talented newcomer as his yard man.

Enter Alec Richardson. He came to town in 1893 as a Western Union lineman working for the Arcadia, Gulf Coast and Lakeland Railroad. When that venture went "bust," Richardson found himself without employment, accepting  the work that was available. 

But Jack understood that Richardson possessed skills far beyond his new job title. Decades later, when Jack recorded the history of Bradenton's early telephone system, he made a point of saying Richardson's name "should be recorded in history books."

Above: An early telephone switchboard inside Warren Opera House. 

Richardson knew how to build a telephone line and decided he could connect Dr. Leffingwell’s home to his drug store. Of course,  Braidentown didn't exactly have a telephone-supply store. So Alec and Jack improvised. Two telephones were purchased from the Standard Electric Company. For poles, Richardson and young Jack used pine saplings. For glass insulators, they used broken necks of glass beer bottles.

Jack remembered the result rather enthusiastically, "Alec Richardson, with my assistance, installed the equipment, using pine saplings for poles and beer bottle necks for insulators, AND THE DARN THING WORKED."

According to the family's oral history, it was the first telephone in Manatee County. 

Soon, everyone wanted a telephone. 

Once neighbors saw what the Leffingwells had accomplished, a private convenience for the town doctor quickly became something bigger. 

H.G.H. Reed and Ollie Stuart, who operated the general store next to Leffingwell's drug store, offered to operate a manual switchboard without charge. A tiny public telephone exchange was born with just a handful of subscribers.

Line No. 1 went to the Leffingwell residence at Point Pleasant. Reed had No. 2. Stuart had No. 3. H.L. Wadham had No. 4. The Leffingwell Drug Store was No. 5.

Above: A more advanced swtchboard. 

That little homemade network became the Gulf Coast Telephone Company.

As it grew, Dr. L.R. Warren bought a 40% interest, Stuart became manager and the switchboard moved into the Warren Opera House building. Olive Hitchings became the county's first paid telephone operator.

But Jack was thinking much bigger. By 1900, at roughly 17 years old, Jack took the $500 his uncle had given him $500 to “start an orange grove,” and invested it in an audacious plan: build an independent telephone line all the way from Braidentown to Tampa. Once again, Alec Richardson would provide the engineering know-how.

Richardson mapped the approximately 40-mile route, stringing the wire in trees as they went. They made it all the way to the Tampa city limits before Jack's dream came crashing down.

The Bell Company held an exclusive franchise in Tampa and refused to allow the independent line to connect. But the wire didn't go to waste. Jack negotiated with Western Union, and the telephone line was converted for use by the Gulf Coast Telegraph Company. 

The teenager's grand telephone connection to Tampa had failed. But the little telephone company he and Richardson helped create back home most certainly had not.

In 1901, Ohio state Sen. W.G. Brorein purchased the Gulf Coast Telephone Company and Gulf Coast Telegraph Company and combined them as the Peninsular Telephone Company.

By Thanksgiving of that year, the Bradenton system had a 100-line switchboard serving 85 subscribers.

By 1914, when WWI broke out, Jack volunteered to serve. After the war was over, Jack  found himself in Cuba working in the sugar industry. There he met a developer who wanted to establish a telephone exchange on the Isle of Pines, an island south of Cuba. 

Jack knew just where to find the equipment.

He returned to Bradenton and gathered pieces of the city's now-obsolete telephone system, including an old manual switchboard and what his wife, Ora, remembered as the first telephone bell ever used in Bradenton. He hauled the equipment to the island and put it back to work.

By then, Peninsular had constructed a new Bradenton building and installed a completely automatic telephone exchange described in the historical record as among the most modern systems of its kind for a city of Bradenton's size.

Back in Cuba, Jack’s telephone company was serving the population well. The venture also changed Jack's personal life. He hired Ora Cooper as one of his telephone operators, and the two married on the island in 1933.

Ora later joked that Jack "married the telephone operator so he wouldn't have to pay her."

The Depression eventually crippled the little telephone company as subscribers began removing their phones to save money. In 1939, Jack and Ora sold the system to a buyer from Havana for $1,000 and returned to Florida in haste, as they viewed the company as worthless and figured they were lucky to get that much! 

While Jack was away, the telephone industry he had helped pioneer had changed dramatically. When he returned to Florida in 1939, he expected to find work in the field that had fascinated him since boyhood. Instead, he discovered that modern telecommunications had advanced beyond his experience. After repeatedly seeking work with the telephone company, he was eventually given a one-year position sweeping a warehouse.

Above: The telephone company that eventually became GTE and Verizon, first started by Jack Leffingwell. 

For Jack, who had once helped build Manatee County's earliest telephone system from copper wire, pine saplings and beer bottles, the demotion was deeply humiliating. He had always seen himself as an innovator and a forward thinker. Now, the industry he had helped introduce to Bradenton had moved forward without him.

In 1957, Peninsular merged into General Telephone & Electronics, better remembered by later generations as GTE, and eventually becoming Verizon. 

And what became of young Jack, who had helped start it all?

He eventually found his niche in a decidedly less technical way.

Decades earlier, Jack had watched a similar turn in Alec Richardson's life. The gifted lineman who engineered those first crude telephone lines later found himself working as a yard man. But Jack never saw Alec through the lens of the job he ended up doing. To him, Richardson remained the visionary who could look at pine trees, beer bottles and a coil of old wire and see a telephone system. Perhaps when Jack's own career took an unexpected turn, there was a lesson in that: a man's last job didn't have to define the life that came before it—or what came next. 

Jack, too, refused to let his last job define him.

In his later years, he became a writer of Manatee County history for the Bradenton Herald. And when he wrote the story of those first telephone lines, he made certain to write Alec back into the history they had made together.

Richardson's name, Jack insisted, "should be recorded."

Well, Jack made it happen. And the darn thing worked. 

All photos courtesy of Manatee County Public Library System.