“Hello Central”

That’s what you’d say to make a phone call in Georgetown Texas a few years back.

“Central” was a small building near the square (just south of the Wildfire Restaurant), and the switchboard operators were young women known as “Hello girls.” If you were lucky enough to have a phone on the wall at home, it was most likely a party line and connected to the phones of quite a few others.

The phone didn’t have a number, it had a “ring,” and everyone just knew their own, which was a combination of “longs and shorts.” So, if you needed to call Fred and Edna’s house, you would know their ring was “two shorts and a long,” etc. When a call was made, all of the phone’s would ring, and it didn’t matter whose ring it was, anyone could pick up and listen in if they wanted to. The downside (other than the obvious personal invasion part), was that the more folks that picked up, the weaker the call would become. A soldier during WWI had just gotten off of a ship in California and called his mother late one night to let her know that he was alright, but others who heard her ring wanted to know what was going on as well. The line became so weak that she had to stop their conversation and say, “Now…this is my son Robert calling me. Y’all hang up and call me tomorrow and I’ll tell you what he said!” A few of them hung up, and others just hung on.

If you didn’t know someone’s ring, you’d just pick up the receiver and say, “Hello Central” and a “Hello girl” would answer and connect you. “Hello girls” had all the news in town, so if you were curious whether a baby had been born yet or not, you’d just pick up and ask one of them. And it wasn’t uncommon to get a long distance call into Central with a request that went something like; ”My husband’s working there for a man that has a red picket fence and a black dog and I need to get in touch with him.” The “Hello girl” might say, “Yes, I know who that it is, hold the line and I’ll connect you.”

They were also the local “emergency alert system.” Central’s ring was “five longs” and when that went off, everyone would pick up to get the news. It could have been anything from a mad dog on the loose to a bad storm heading towards Georgetown.

As Clara Guthrie Williams put it, “The service was just one piece of line strung up to a small cedar pole with an insulator on it that was tied to a fence post. Storms or wind would weaken the signal, so someone had to work the line all the time to keep the brush off of it.”

A 6” x 6” wet plate ambrotype. Resource was “Georgetown’s Yesteryears” a book project of the former Georgetown Heritage Society.

“Milk money”

The dairies near Georgetown in the early 20th century were just small family farms, and everyone in that family would start their day by milking cows. Actually, if you grew up on any farm with cows, a standard chore for the kids was to milk them before going to school, and then again after school. But if you lived in town, life was easier. If you were out of milk or butter, you would let the dairy know how much you needed a day or two in advance, and after all the “udder tuggin” was completed of a morning, they’d fill up milk jars, cover them with a cardboard cap and deliver it to your porch, possibly by the same person who had just “tugged” it. In exchange, you’d drop some money into an empty milk jar and put it out on the porch, or into a bucket hanging out on the fence. Leaving the milk on the porch was the best spot, since you were most likely off picking, plucking, or skining something for your family to eat that night for supper. If there wasn’t a dairy farm nearby, milk might be obtained from a neighbor’s cows, although it might be in exchange for whatever you’d just finished picking plucking or skinning.

The challenges are different now. One must drive all the way to the grocery store.

Image is a photo of a whole plate platinum print from a wet collodion negative. Resource was “Georgetown’s Yesteryears” a book project of the former Georgetown Heritage Society.

“Noah and Nanna”

Known today as the “Come and Take It” flag, in 1835 it was just “The old cannon flag,” which flew over the little junk cannon at the battle of Gonzales and the first shot fired of the Texas revolution.

The flag itself was lost to history, but someone who saw it and later described it was Noah Smithwick, a familiar name to anyone interested in Texas history. His book, “The Evolution of a State” is considered to be, as J. Frank Dobie described it, “The best of all books dealing with life in early Texas.” And as an enthusiast of Texas history, it’s been #1 in my Texana library for a very long time. I “splurged” many years ago to acquire an early edition of the book.

Following the revolution, Noah’s family lived near Georgetown, and then some years later he helped build a gristmill with his nephew east of Marble Falls where the community of “Smithwick” is still on the map.

By 1861 the Civil War was firing up and Noah, being a supporter of the union, decided it would be better for his health to leave Texas for California. His nephew stayed and ended up being killed and thrown into a waterhole.

By 1897, only two of his five children remained alive. Noah was now 89 and completely blind. His daughter Nancy (who went by “Nanna”) was a writer, who realized the importance of preserving her dad’s knowledge of early Texas, and also that his time was running out. She left Georgetown for California and spent the next two years documenting Noah’s memories as he sat in his chair and recounted them to her.

Regarding the flag, Noah had arrived at Gonzales the day after the battle and helped fix the cart carrying the flag and the cannon before they all moved on towards San Antonio. What we know as the flag today, being a single star over a cannon, was made as a third-person sketch from a description being given by a blind man. We won’t ever know just how accurate it really was, but today, Nancy’s original pencil sketch of the flag is in the Gonzales Memorial Museum next to the original cannon.

Noah died at the age of 91 in October of 1899. “Evolution of a State” was published in 1900 and remained popular throughout the 20th century and beyond.

And for a Texas history lovin’ guy like myself, here’s where things get really weird.

At some point, Nanna went back out to California to visit friends and became ill. She sent a wire back to Georgetown to her friend Fred Millholin, who worked for the newspaper, asking him if he would buy her house for $500, which he did. Nancy later died in 1937 and was buried in Santa Ana.

Fred and Almeda Millholin spent the rest of their lives in the house, and they had a daughter named Rosemary who also lived there. As fate would have it, over twenty-five years ago Rosemary was moving into assisted living when I bought “Millholin house” from her. And it was years later before I learned that Nanna Smithwick-Donaldson had been the previous owner.

Talk about a book feeling right at home. “Evolution of a State” was already here at home…long before I was ever even here…and at home, with my own copy!