– Part 1 in a Series of Historical Messages Celebrating Highland Telephone Cooperative’s 50th Anniversary - 

BACK IN 1952 A YOUNG LAWYER just a few years out of the University of Tennessee Law College went from door to door in Scott and Morgan Counties asking people to invest $5 apiece in a project that would bring a profound
change to the area: communications with the rest of the world. In the fifties there weren’t many telephones here. Wartburg, Oneida, Sunbright and one or two other places had a few, but most homes and businesses were just too far apart to make it profitable for a private company to string lines out to everybody. So while the rest of the
country got telephone service, we were just left behind.

WE DID IT FOR OURSELVES.

Folks here decided to change that. We wanted telephones for our families. We needed them for our businesses. Had
to have them to bring jobs to the area and keep them here. So we set about starting a telephone system ourselves.
W.H. Swain, W.D. Human, T.W. Welch, R.L. Carr, C.E. Byrd, O.C. Duncan, W. Summers, M. Terry, Dr. M. Thompson and Congressman Howard H. Baker got together to form Highland Telephone Cooperative.

WE ALL OWN IT. WE ALL BENEFIT.

Making Highland Telephone a cooperative instead of a corporation was important for two reasons. First, it meant we could offer service to everybody, no matter how far the line had to be strung to reach them. The system would be owned by all the members, and it would operate for their benefit. There were no stockholders demanding that we make a big profit on every phone. Being a cooperative also meant that Highland Telephone could get a loan from the Rural Electrification Administration to get started. But we needed a thousand members to qualify. And so that young lawyer, Howard Baker, Jr., and others who understood how important it was tobring communications to the area, went from door to door collecting $5 apiece for co-op memberships.

IT WASN’T EASY. BUT IT WAS WORTH IT.

It took a long time and a lot of effort. But finally, three years after W.H. Swain bought the first membership in 1952, the thousandth member had joined, the loan was approved and on August 1, 1955 Highland Telephone Cooperative
opened for business above the hardware store in Sunbright. Eventually parts of Anderson and Campbell Counties and
McCreary County, Kentucky became part of Highland’s service area. The system grew from the thousand original members to more than 28,000 today.We’ve gone from hand-cranked phones to a fiber-optic-fed network. Our HCC subsidiary offers long distance, cell phones, internet, broadband, and more. Now people and businesses who once couldn’t get any phone service have a communications system that meets the highest standards around the world. Which is a very impressive return on the original members’ $5 investments.