Getting the Message Across

In 1900, were less than 100 people in Buffalo Grove. Most of the earliest families were German immigrants fleeing their homeland, for cheap yet fertile land being advertised in America in the 1850s and 1860s. Even though the area was very rural, there were ways to send a message. Communicating with family in Chicago, around the United States, and abroad was important. For a family in Buffalo Grove, you had a few different methods of communication: letters & postcards, telephone, and the telegraph.

In 1901, the Weidner General Store in Buffalo Grove got the town's first, and only, telephone. If you wanted to make a call you had to travel to the store. This meant that everyone in the store could hear your conversation. The Weidner General Store was the only store in Buffalo Grove at the time, and it was the gossip hub.

Making a call using an old wall telephone is not that same as it is today. You would pick up the receiver and ask the operator to direct you to who you wanted to call. Since this was the only telephone in town, there were no local calls. You were most likely looking to phone someone in a neighboring town or Chicago. It was expensive too – you were charged by the length of your phone call. In 1910 for example, it cost $5.00 for the first 3 minutes of a call from New York to Chicago, and $1.50 per additional minute. Due to this high price tag, you weren’t making a long distance call in Buffalo Grove unless it was very important.

A much more affordable way to send a message was by telegram. Using a telegraph, you could send a message using Morse code. The telegraph was made possible in Chicago beginning in 1848, and by the 1880s, Chicago was a hub for telegrams in the western part of the country. The telegraph was also useful for connecting small local stores to the suppliers in Chicago, and continued to be important through World War I. After telephones became more common, the telegraph started to become obsolete.

To send a telegram, messages had to be short, and were still a little bit expensive for the average Buffalo Grove farmer. Price depended on word length and distance sent, but it would average about 30-40 cents a message in 1900.

The cheapest but slowest way to communicate in 1900 was by letter and postcard. In 1900, it cost 2 cents to send a letter, and 1 cent to send a postcard through the US Postal Service (USPS). In 1915, Peter Weidner was hired to deliver mail in the Buffalo Grove area, servicing Rural Delivery Route No. 1. Before the Rural Delivery Route was implemented, you would have to take your letter to the general store to have it delivered.