AT&T built thousands of microwave relay towers as part of its Long Line communications network in the 50s and 60s. Although they haven’t been used in nearly fifty years, many remain standing across Indiana. Until about a decade ago, one loomed over AT&T’s central office on East Berry Street in Fort Wayne.
Early telephone networks were entirely local. Creating long-distance connections was insecure and expensive, so AT&T sought to change things through microwave technology. The company succeeded in 1947, and what became the Long Lines network was born. It revolutionized communication! Unfortunately, the rise of geostationary satellites and fiber optics eventually led the system to become obsolete. AT&T sold off many of the microwave towers around the turn of the twenty-first century. Many lost their distinctive horn-shaped antenna.
Built in 19351, AT&T’s central office at 411 East Berry Street in Fort Wayne was an important part of the Long Lines network. Atop a self-supporting tower, its KS-15676 horn antennae cast and relayed a signal from Zanesville, thirteen miles southwest, to Leo, thirteen miles northeast2. After the program ended, the building’s tower still stood -with a single horn antenna, to boot- until around 2016. It’s still visible on Google Street View.
AT&T’s central office wasn’t the only building in downtown Fort Wayne once crowned by a microwave tower. Just a block southwest, the imposing Frontier Building at 303 East Berry also played a key role in the city’s telecommunications history. Before Frontier, the place was home to General Telephone Company, later GTE, and eventually Verizon3.
The structure was topped by a lattice tower at least as late as the 1960s. By the time I was a kid, it’d been encased in a brown cylinder capped by what appeared to be a series of shallow drums. Unfortunately, the tower was dismantled around 20024.
It’s been eight months since my last Long Line road trip. Believe it not, I’ve gotten emails asking when the next one’s coming! I’m hoping to hit the road again this fall, once the leaves drop and some hidden towers in southern Indiana finally come back into view. In the meantime, I’ve visited a few central offices like Fort Wayne’s that once played big roles in the network. They’re trickier to research than the towers themselves, but maybe that’s where I should focus while I wait for the foliage to clear.
Sources Cited
1 Allen County Office of Information & GIS Services. (2025). Parcel ID: 02-12-02-430-007.000-074. Allen County, Indiana Assessor. map, Fort Wayne, IN.Â
2 Long Lines Map and Information (n.d.). Web. Map. Retrieved June 27, 2025.
3 Perry, G.D. True Fort Wayne History (2021, August 14). In 1971 this was the division headquarters for General Telephone Company of Indiana, which later became GTE, and then Verizon [Post]. Facebook.
4 Frontier Building (Fort Wayne, Indiana). Wikimapia. Web. Retrieved June 27, 2025.Â
You’ve finally set me straight. I was always thinking of the GTE-Frontier with it’s obvious tower as being connected to the long lines network because I never took the time to sort out the two different companies and wasn’t aware of the AT&T building.
Like Howard above, I knew Ft. Wayne was served by what we called “General Tel”. The ATT network must have been one of the reasons “long distance” was so expensive in days of yore.
I wondered why the ATT building was so small in comparison; that makes sense.