The Haskell Exchange — ca. 1910
by Paula Bosse
The switchboard hub in Old East Dallas… (click for larger image)
by Paula Bosse
Above, the building that housed the Haskell Exchange of Southwestern Telegraph and Telephone (the company which later became Southwestern Bell Telephone and, eventually, part of AT&T), located at the southeast corner of Bryan and Haskell in Old East Dallas. It was so cute and quaint back in 1910 (the year this postcard was mailed). AT&T still has a building on this very same corner — over a century later. Unfortunately, the building stopped being quaint a long time ago. See the same location today, here. Some awnings might help….
Below is part of an article describing a tour of the Exchange taken by the Dallas Advertising League in 1911 (click for larger image):
Dallas Morning News, Feb. 11, 1911
Cattle Raisers’ Association of Texas, 1912
DMN, May 2, 1912
Dallas Historical Society
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Sources & Notes
More about the operators of Southwestern Tel. & Tel. (with photos of their “rest room”) can be found in the Flashback Dallas post “Work and Play in Telephone Land,” here.
In this case “exchange” did not mean the same thing as telephone exchanges such as “Taylor,” “Emerson,” “Lakeside,” “Fleetwood,” “Riverside,” etc. Read more at Wikipedia here and here for the distinctions.
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Copyright © 2016 Paula Bosse. All Rights Reserved.
Flashback : Dallas 
Very interesting post Paula! My dad worked for Southwestern Bell for 33 years after the end of WWII. A good part of that time was spent at the Haskell Exchange. Thanks for the story.
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So what part of the city does the Haskell exchange cover? (Modern-day 421-nnnn, 424-nnnn, 426-, 428-, 429-.)
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The Haskell Exchange was a building housing the workings of a branch of the telephone company (switchboards, circuitry, etc.) as well as general offices. Switchboard operators, technicians, and various other telephone company employees worked there. …I think. It is not the same as the telephone exchanges such as “Taylor,” “Emerson,” and “Lakeside.” (Although, as it was on the edge of East Dallas, the Haskell Exchange building was in the Taylor exchange. I meant to add Wikipedia links to these distinctions. I’ll do that now!
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I dug a little more and it turned out Haskell was an exchange serving a physical area. Here are a few samples of street addresses in the Haskell area:
Prefix ZIP Code Street names
421 75210, 75215 Scyene Road, Wall St
424 75235 Stemmons, Harry Hines
426 75210 Metropolitan Ave, S 2nd Ave
428 75215 Cadiz St, Hatcher St, Reed Ln
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[…] were also downtown and suburban telephone exchanges which handled local calls, as well as the Haskell exchange which was handling long-distance […]
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[…] operators (and supportive coworkers) who were working in unairconditioned conditions (!!) at the Haskell Exchange on Bryan and at the Akard Street headquarters downtown staged what news reports called a […]
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