The building at 12 Hancock Avenue was never meant to be whimsical. Constructed in 1896 by Richard Deutman and Son to Quartermaster Plan 115, it went up as a two-story duplex on Officers' Row, the northern edge of the Jefferson Barracks parade ground, where the placement of quarters made military rank legible at a glance. Officers and their families could watch soldiers drill and maneuver from the comfort of their own windows. Electricity arrived in 1909, bathrooms in 1925, and second-floor sunrooms with enlarged first-floor rooms beneath them in 1938. The officers moved out in the mid-1940s, and the post itself was deactivated in 1946, with the federal government transferring tracts of land and buildings to St. Louis County in 1950.
For decades afterward, the duplex sat within what became the 426-acre Jefferson Barracks Historic District, added to the National Register of Historic Places in 1972. It is one of only two remaining structures from that stretch of Officers' Row. What it became next is the odd part: a telephone museum, run largely by the people who spent their careers working for the phone company.
Employees and retirees from Southwestern Bell, SBC and AT&T, along with members of the Telecom Pioneers -- a nonprofit telephone-company employee service organization -- and their families and friends, put in more than 66,500 hours repairing and renovating the building. The work took 13 years. Volunteers installed a new slate roof and four new furnaces, replaced porch decking, and cut a doorway through 11 inches of brick and plaster near the telephone pole so both mirrored halves of the duplex could be connected; a similar opening was made on the second floor. The museum, leased from the St. Louis County Parks Department, welcomed its first visitors on May 4, 2016.
That origin story is why the collection reads less like an institution's acquisitions strategy and more like a profession's collective memory. The museum holds telephones manufactured from the late 1800s through the 2010s, hundreds of pieces of telephone-related equipment, memorabilia spanning the 1880s through the 2000s, and military telephones from World War I through the Gulf War. Many of the docents have 30 or more years in the telecommunications industry, and they are the ones who explain what each artifact did and when.
Among the artifacts is a telephone chart distributed at the 1904 St. Louis World's Fair by The Bell Telephone Company of Missouri. Unfolded, it measures 18 yards -- 54 feet -- and lists the exchange, number, and first and last names of residential subscribers in alphabetical order. It also records the going rate: $3.00 a month for a direct line, $2.00 for a duplex, or two-party, line. In today's dollars, the museum notes, that direct line would run about $85.69 a month, and the duplex line about $57.12. The estimated growth for 1905 was another 10 yards of names.
Then there are the character phones, the ones that give the current exhibit its name. Winnie-the-Pooh, R2-D2, Big Bird and Kermit the Frog are all represented as telephones. They keep company with a 1993 limited-edition Star Trek USS Enterprise telephone made by Telemania, licensed in the 1990s to produce Star Trek phones and other consumer electronics. It is an exact replica of the original NCC-1701; when it rings, the interior warp nacelles light up, and the owner can choose between a normal ringer and a Star Trek red alert. There is also Charlie the Tuna, a circa-1987 one-piece touch-tone phone depicting the Star-Kist spokes-fish who believed he had good taste.
The museum frames all of this as engineering education as much as nostalgia. Its exhibits are hands-on and built to explain how things work, an approach the staff says was created to inspire interest in engineering and history. Artifacts carry detailed description cards listing the item's name, the dates it was used, and the purpose it served in the telecommunications industry. Exhibits rotate, so repeat visitors find new material. The museum recommends allowing at least an hour, and more if the artifacts hold your attention. Admission is $5.00 for adults, $4.00 for seniors 60 and over, $3.00 for children ages 5 to 12, free for children 4 and under, and free for active military with ID. The building is entirely on one floor, with accessible parking, a ramp on the east side, and an accessible restroom. Groups of 10 or more are asked to reserve at least two weeks ahead so a docent can be available.
The museum is open Wednesday through Sunday from 9:00 a.m. to 2:00 p.m., year-round except Easter, Thanksgiving and Christmas. It sits about a 15-minute drive south of downtown St. Louis, and it has become a small local media fixture -- featured on Nine PBS's Living St. Louis, on KSDK, and on St. Louis Public Radio, where it was grouped with the city's quirky and small hidden museums. The radio segment's framing was blunt about the stakes: two former Southwestern Bell employees said they felt the museum was necessary as landline telephones fade from collective memory in favor of smartphones and cell phones. "We have roughly 140 years of history from the oldest phones to the latest," one of them said.
That is the tension the building holds. A structure built so officers could watch soldiers march now preserves the machinery of a technology most visitors under 30 have never used as a primary phone. The parade ground is quiet. The phones, including a frog and a Wookiee-adjacent droid, still ring.