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First Telephones in Cashiers
Written By: Jane Gibson Nardy - Cashiers Historical Society | Issue: 2019/03 - March
Later this year, a coffee-table type book will be published by the Cashiers Historical Society titled “Faces & Places of Cashiers Valley.”
Scores of folks, headed by Millie Lathan, have been working on this book for quite some time and a month or so ago, the question was asked, “When did the first telephones arrive in Cashiers?”
After seeing a lot of estimated dates being offered for the first Cashiers phones, I put on my thinking cap and remembered an article I had written many years ago on this same subject. I had quoted from an August 1973 The State magazine article by Leeming Grimshawe titled “The Wandering Wires of Cashiers Valley.” The two-page article stated that in about 1898, when Grimshawe was a child, some men from Walhalla, South Carolina, who were working on providing a telephone line from South Carolina to Cashiers Valley, visited the Grimshawe home in Whiteside Cove and soon a telephone was put into their house.
George M. Cole was the postmaster in Cashiers Valley and the Post Office was in his store, so the logical place to end the Walhalla-to-Cashiers telephone line was at Cole’s Store. Each phone was one of those hand-cranked affairs run by two dry cell batteries. George Cole’s phone had three long rings and the Grimshawe phone in Whiteside Cove was a short, a long and a short ring.
On one occasion, Leeming Grimshawe’s father was talking with George Cole on the phone when they heard pistol shots. Mr. Cole put down the phone but didn’t hang up and went to see what was happening. He came back with the news that one man had been killed and another severely wounded. This proved to be a feud between the Long family and the Pells, which later had much publicity. I immediately knew that event happened on an August afternoon in 1901 when Evan Pell was shot and killed in front of his store, which is now known as Cornucopia Restaurant. A little over a year ago, I wrote a Laurel Magazine article about Pell’s death titled “1901 Murder of Evan Pell.”
There is still no exact date known to prove when the earliest telephone was installed in Cashiers but we do now know that there was a phone in use by August of 1901.
The picture accompanying this article shows from left to right, George M. Cole, his daughters Rosa Cole and Kidder Cole and standing in the background, Valincha Cole Zachary, the mother of George Cole and the second wife of Alexander Zachary. The site is the front porch and steps of the George M. Cole house, still standing today.
