Read time: 4 min.

I found myself diving into the history of Indiana’s old AT&T Long Line towers a few months ago. I got a bug up my keister to document them all, so I got in my car and drove around the state. I’ve been to twenty-six so far, and I made a map to help me keep track of them. You can see it here.

The Long Lines network was AT&T’s attempt to create a long-distance communication network by using microwaves to beam a signal over long distances. It worked, but microwaves are tricky: they don’t follow the Earth’s curve. The company had to build an intricate series of towers to send and receive the waves at line-of-sight. Each featured enormous horn antennae to gather and condense the data they received.

I wrote more about the company’s project here. I’m interested in it because I couldn’t help but notice two of its towers as a kid. Every other week, my mom and stepdad ferried my brother and me north on I-69 to visit my dad. I never failed to peer up from my Gameboy near Warren and Zanesville to gaze at them.

Does that sound weird? It is, but hear me out. Back then, the towers still featured weird, horn-shaped antennae I’d never seen before. They stood next to little concrete bunkers, and I imagined Billy Joel or Shania Twain singing inside. I assumed their performances were beamed to Mom’s Civic via Majic 95.1 as we passed!

In those days, I didn’t realize the towers were critical parts of the country’s long-distance communication system from the 1940s to the 1980s, when they became obsolete. A successor to AT&T sold most of the towers around the year 2000, but many still stand. My office is three-quarters of a mile away from one that looms over Anderson. It’s impossible to miss, and it convinced me to learn more about them.

Documenting AT&T’s Long Line towers and offices will be my next big statewide project. The map I’ve created will serve as a working document to help me keep track of them. For now, it consists of the tower sites and an Indiana border I imported as a .kml file. Antenna icons represent microwave relay towers, while phone icons represent AT&T central offices that were part of the network.

Green icons indicate towers I’ve been to and still exist, and red icons indicate ones that have been demolished. Gray icons are sites I haven’t visited yet. Over time, my goal is to color in all the gray ones! I got the information I used in the map from Long-Lines.com, which is probably the best website devoted to the topic.

Eventually, I plan to include a layer of lines between the towers and add the ones they connected to in Ohio, Kentucky, Illinois, and Michigan. I’ve been to twenty-six sites as I write this, and I hope to knock the rest out in 2024. I’m not planning on documenting them with any crazy gear, just my iPhone 12 and my ancient Panasonic Lumix DMC-FZ5 for its crazy zoom.

I plan to post about Long Line towers on Sundays. Indiana’s are underrepresented on the internet, and I’m excited for this project to continue to unfold!