Wyoming pioneer Nellie Gattliff Sargent had a great fear of electrical storms, and her family witnessed first-hand the dangers of having a telephone during one of these storms.

Sargent had arrived in the Arvada Territory in Wyoming in 1922 with her husband and three young children.

As storm clouds gathered in the wide-open skies, she would keep her eye out for cyclones, hail and lightning. Her daughter, Ruth Sargent Nelson, recalled how her mom would hurry the children inside the house during these storms.

“My mother always made us three children keep away from the screens and open doors, but especially the telephone,” Nelson said in a 1984 interview for the Arvada Historical Society.

The first phone lines on these rural ranches were run along barbed wire fences, and in later years

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