Cheap Phones For Farmers

New Company Making Telling Efforts to get Farmers

OFFERED $2 PHONES

Without Toll in the County - Merchants Will Subscribe If Farmers Become Patrons

Ann Arbor is to again be the center of a merry telephone war. The new telephone company is rapidly pushing its work just the same as if it had contracts for 500 or 1,000 phones in its hands and it is reaching out for county business. there seems every prospect of a franchise being granted in Ypsilanti and rumor has it that Milan will probably grant a franchise.

Ann Arbor merchants are averse to having two telephones, but the Washtenaw Home telephone Co., which is the name by which the independent company is known are evidently preparing to play a trump card, which they believe will make the merchants want their phone. They expect to connect up most of the good farms in the county by telephone and permit them to telephone into Ann Arbor without any toll charge.

The Bell Company have been starting a number of rural telephone exchanges with a charge of $7.50 a year to the farmer, but the most of these require a 5 or 10-cent toll charge when talking with Ann Arbor. The new company propose to make it possible to telephone any place in the county without any toll charge.

To indicate how anxious they are to get the farmers connected, a prominent supervisor of the county who already has a Bell telephone in informs the Argus that the independent line's agents have been trying to get him to put in the independent line so as to be able to talk to Ann Arbor without charge. He had been holding back, hoping that the Bell company would drop the toll charge, but now the independent company had offered to put a phone in for him with the right of free telephoning to any point in the county for $2 a year and the same offer had been made to his neighbor.

"Are you going to put it in?" he was asked

"Sure, I am. I want to telephone to Ann Arbor and I don't want to be obliged to pay every time I do it."

Of course if the new company gets a large number of farmers connected up the business men may look with more favor than they now do on the new phone. At least that seems to be the hope of the independents.

But this is only an indication of the merry telephone war that promises to be on in this section within a few months.