Telephone service first came to Whitmore in 1947, when Rika and Ray Coffelt established phone service in Millville. Ray Coffelt said:

I got the contract for dismantling the Postal Telegraph Company, which went into bankruptcy about 1944. I got one hundred miles to remove. I got the copper, insulator, cross arms and poles. Another thing that helped me was that PTand T [Pacific Telephone and Telegraph] dismantled their open wire lead from Sacramento to Portland. Rika would help me, picking up pieces of hardware that I could use to build this line, besides all of the material of the Postal Telegraph Company.

We started Shasta Telephone and Telegraph company in 1946. We contacted the utility commission in San Francisco. In order to file for the territory you had to file with the Railroad Commission. There was an area that was not spoken for, we came here just for that. This was unassigned territory. There was no telephone service here.

We sold our house in Dunsmuir, we also had to live a year without income. I financed it [the phone company] right up to the last day. We bought a lot in Millville and built our house. The Bell company agreed to build a toll line from Redding to Millville, but they were going to collect fifteen cents for every call that came through. When we went into business, I charged 5% above my cost. The PUC set my rate. They had what they called a uniform system of accounts. We had to keep those accounts, and on top of that, we had to collect the excise tax.

We had to collect 25 percent on all calls over a dollar, and 10 percent on calls under a dollar. We had to bill the people and collect it and send it in every month. . . . We had a toll line both ways from Millville to Whitmore, so we got the tolls on both ways. In Whitmore we had a pay station in the general store. That was all the service we had in Whitmore.

We gave service to the forest service. In 1946 we had a pay station at Big Wheels [on Highway 44 near Shingletown]. We had a radio system connected to Manzanita Lake. We issued credit cards, and put in dial service.

When I was a little boy, communications were a great interest to me. After we lived up in Round Mountain, I got interested in what they called the people’s line up there, trying to patch up things that had gone into decay. Before the turn of the century, there was no electricity in the country, and ground line telephone lines worked fairly satisfactorily. They just strung a line across the ground or in the trees. A piece of wire insulated from the ground was something that you could talk on. But, there's only so much you can do with one wire. When power came into the country, the [phone] line was just like listening to a power line. You couldn't talk over the noise.

You couldn't ring anybody if there were too many bells on it. When it got too full, somebody would chop off the line, and somebody would put in a switch. . . . It was a relay system. That only lasted so long, and then it went into decay.

Back to 1885-88, Terry Mills built a flume down from Round Mountain to Bella Vista. And on the flume line they had a telephone line. That was the communication that probably was the best.

Going back farther, . . . H. E. Williams had started his line up Hat Crick [Creek] and he came over the mountain, through Whitmore, down into Millville, one of these famous ground wires that had gone into decay. . . . About 1914, a fellow by the name of Lou Smith, that lived in South Cow Creek, took over some of the things that were strung around here, and formed what they called the Bear Creek-Millville telephone . . .

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