By Mike Donahue

Moapa Valley Progress

Bringing The Whole World To Rural Residents

As regular readers are aware, Rural Rants is a column about rural living in general, Moapa Valley in particular and the people who live, work and play here. Its ultimate goal is to celebrate those personalities and ideals that make our out-of-the-way community special.

Our lives out here in the sticks is the other side of Clark County; the smaller, more countrified part that often means unique barnyard aromas, coyote calls from dusk to dawn and vast lonely stretches of desert we can see from our back – or front — yard.

It also means neighbors who not only know who we are, they actually care.

Fortunately, while rural means being apart from the crush of people; smoggy, hazy skies, and swell of humanity that means urban Clark County living, it doesn’t mean forced isolation, seclusion and segregation, unless that’s what we want. We have a choice.

For most of us, we owe that choice to a group of men who started a telephone company more than 100 years ago.

On April 6, 1909 a group of Moapa Valley men filed company articles of incorporation for what would later become the Moapa Valley Telephone Company. Clark County wouldn’t be formed until 1910, so the articles were filed in Lincoln County.

According to “Fence Post to Fiber: Histories of the Telephone Industry in Nevada 1887-1997,” the early telephone lines were single wires running through thorny mesquite trees. It must have been a sticky proposition to repair breaks. Anyway, the wires were connected to a 10-line switchboard with bells for each line.

The switchboard was located in the S.R. Whitehead store, then on Overton’s main street, and Whitehead’s daughters operated it. Twenty-foot long cedar poles, covered with large knotty stubs, hauled from Sheep Mountain eventually became telephone poles. Wire, crossbars, braces and insulators arrived in Moapa Valley by rail.

In 1916 Warren H. Lyon became phone company manager and he moved the switchboard into the back of the Beal Lyon Drug Store and the Lyons have been in charge ever since.

Pretty high school girls working for Warren got business experience as operators. They probably knew more than anybody else about what went on in town.

By 1924, Warren had pretty much acquired a majority of the company stock and he became president. When power from Hoover Dam arrived in the valley in the 1930s, the system was changed to two-wire and the service area expanded to St. Thomas, Kaolin, Overton, Logandale (then called Logan) and Glendale (then called Hupton).

By the time Warren’s son Mack, (the same W. Mack Lyon whose name is on the middle school) was 12 years old he was doing service calls and patrolling the lines in horse-drawn buggy. He had help keeping everything in operation from Crayton Johnson and William Dotson.

In 1934 long distance to Las Vegas was established and in 1935 a toll line was set up. In 1941 the switchboard was moved to Mack Lyon’s home and the business has remained in buildings that were family residences ever since.

Every five to 10 years, the company instituted a major change or two, some milestones in Nevada telephone history, which has kept service at the peak of modern efficiency. By 1988 the switchboard had eventually evolved into digital equipment.

In 1996 the company had received right-of-way approval to construct, operate and maintain a fiber optic cable on BLM property.

Fast forward to the 21st Century and the Lyon family is still making improvements linking our small rural community to the rest of the world.

We are connected, at our option, to millions upon millions of others through the magic of computers and the internet. We can surf the web, make purchases and/or friends, play games, connect to people we may never meet in person and a thousand other actions through our Moapa Valley Telephone Company phone lines.

And that’s not the end of it. The Lyon’s are planning to expand the phone company’s fiber optic cable system, perhaps from the street straight into your house.

It’s a good thing.

We can thank the Lyons who have made and continue to make the phone company a good neighbor, one of the cornerstones of rural Nevada.