DID YOU KNOW? 01/05/1854 — Texas Gets Wired
On January 5, 1854, Texans took a huge step toward instant communication when the Texas and Red River Telegraph Company became the first telegraph company chartered in the state. Just a few weeks later, on February 14, the company opened its first Texas office in Marshall, linking East Texas to the wider world with connections that ran through Shreveport to New Orleans.
Early lines weren’t fancy. In places, wire was literally strung from treetop to treetop, and when hard winds snapped it, operators sometimes shut the office down and rode the route to make repairs.
That first spark spread fast—by 1870 Texans had roughly 1,500 miles of telegraph wire. And the original Marshall office kept tapping out messages for more than a century, until Western Union closed it in 1972.
