The first Golden West Telephone Company was incorporated in 1916 by the State of South Dakota as a stock company. The primary purpose of the Telephone Company was to connect via telephone the area's two principle towns of Quinn and Interior.
In 1918, the entire question of service and maintenance became a problem and was further magnified three years later when World War I deflation struck. Not only did the deflation break local farmers and ranchers, but businesses and banks in both Quinn and Interior went bankrupt as well.
Golden West`s fate was much the same with systematic maintenance and the manager's position both becoming things of the past. The number of subscribers continued to dwindle as family after family left South Dakota. By 1930, even the line to Interior was lost. The Company then initiated a system of subscriber maintenance that ultimately fell upon the shoulders of the directors.
The depression of the 1930s struck a second blow. No longer able to operate, Golden West Telephone was offered at sheriff's sale for taxes and was purchased by director George Fauske in 1934. Fauske repaired the lines and once again good service was restored to the area. It was short lived. In March of 1937, a sleet storm devastated the open western South Dakota prairie. Fauske sought to restore service and after two weeks, finally reached Quinn. Service beyond Quinn was never restored, though, due to Fauske`s untimely death in a car-truck accident. Fauske's family subsequently discontinued the service and sold the lines to community groups.
The years passed. World War II came and went and the people of the area once again began to think of the need for better telephone service. The amendment to the Rural Electrification Act in October of 1949 allowed the loaning of REA funds to finance and improve rural telephone service. A meeting of interested individuals was called on Feb. 14, 1950, in Quinn, South Dakota. Ingebert Fauske, son of the late George Fauske, was elected chairman. The Cooperative proceeded to make an application for its first REA loan.
On November 14, 1952, the Cooperative received its charter of incorporation from the state of South Dakota. The directors named the new telephone cooperative, Golden West Telephone Cooperative. Inc., which paid tribute to the original Golden West Telephone Company, started nearly 40 years earlier.
The A section of Golden West's first loan, a loan in the amount of $746,000, was completed in July of 1956, bringing modern dial telephone service to some 633 subscribers. As time went by, the Cooperative extended its service area into eleven central and western South Dakota counties. Existing telephone companies and switch lines were purchased. Additional equipment and new lines were installed to bring modern telephone service to farms, ranches and small towns.
The Cooperative placed its first underground communications cable in 1961 when it served the Titan Missile Site near Wicksville. However, the first major installation was made in 1964 when over 200 miles of underground air pressurized cable was placed into service for the Minuteman Missile defense system. The Cooperative continued to upgrade its exchanges from 8-party lines to 4- or 5-party lines and eventually to private lines.
In 1975, the Cooperative entered into negotiations with Northwestern Bell Telephone for the purchase of Bell System properties. The negotiations culminated with the 1976 purchase of the Midland, Philip, Martin, White River, Milesville and Hayes exchanges, along with the independently-owned Wood Mutual Telephone Company. These acquisitions more than doubled the size of the company from 2,400 to 5,100 customers.
In 1978, the Cooperative entered into a stock-purchase arrangement for the People's Telephone and Telegraph Company of Hot Springs. The Company officially merged with Golden West after the final stock payment on Jan 2, 1982, bringing the Co-op's customer base to nearly 9,300 and increasing the number of employees from 47 to 68.
The number of subscribers served by Golden West Telephone increased to nearly 10,000 with the Dec. 28, 1981 purchase of the Pine Ridge telephone exchange from Bison State Telephone Company of Custer. Former customers of the Extension Telephone Company of White Clay, Nebraska were acquired at approximately the same time and were subsequently served with their own prefix out of the Pine Ridge switchboard.
April 1, 1981 also saw the Cooperative expand its communications' role with the receipt of its first cable television cross-ownership waiver from the Federal Communications Commission (FCC). This, along with subsequent FCC waivers, eventually gave Golden West permission to own and operate 14 cable systems serving nearly 3,000 customers. In recognition of Golden West's involvement in the cable television field, cooperative members attending the September 1982 annual meeting approved changing the name of the cooperative from Golden West Telephone Cooperative, Inc. to Golden West Telecommunications Cooperative, Inc. The cable television operation was later placed into a separate subsidiary called Golden West Cablevision, Inc.
Since then, the cable TV subsidiary has continued to grow through a series of acquisitions including the September 2002 purchase from WCENet, Inc. of the cable TV systems in Lower Brule, Murdo and Reliance. That acquisition was followed in January 2004 by the purchase of the cable TV systems in Armour, Avon, Bonesteel, Burke, Edgemont, Fairfax, Gregory and Trent from Satellite Cable Services and the December 2005 purchase of Hill City from Galaxy Cablevision. Today, Golden West Cablevision along with its sister companies Valley Cablevision and WMW Cable serve 6,400 customers in 31 South Dakota communities.
Golden West took another dramatic step in December of 1984 with the creation of Golden West Tele-Tech, a wholly owned subsidiary of Golden West Telecommunications. The Company began by providing paging and business phone systems throughout the Black Hills area and grew through a series of acquisitions beginning with the 1985 purchase of Rapid Answering Service, a 24X7 answering service and The New Phone Company, a paging and MTS (mobile telephone service) provider. That trend would continue in February of 1989 when Golden West Tele-Tech merged with Telephone Interconnectors to become the areas largest firm specializing in the sale, installation and maintenance of business phone systems. Golden West Tele-Tech would further expand its technology portfolio a decade later with the purchase of Direct Technology, an enterprise-level network integration and consulting firm followed by the 2004 purchase of Alpha Omega Monitoring and Technology, a firm specializing in Digital Video Recorder (DVR) security systems. Golden West Tele-Tech has since changed its name to Golden West Technologies to reflect the ever expanding variety of technologies and services provided by the Company.
On November 1, 1993, the acquisition of GTE's South Dakota properties (Contel of South Dakota) became final. Golden West began providing service to the 8,000 telephone customers in the Custer, Mission, Rosebud, Avon, Freeman, Menno, Scotland and Springfield exchanges through a newly formed subsidiary, Golden West Communications, Inc.
Golden West also purchased the Vivian exchange on January 1, 1994 from CommNet Cellular, Inc. and served the 120 telephone customers in that area under the subsidiary company, Vivian Telephone Company. The Golden West Communications properties, the areas acquired from GTE, were later brought into the Vivian Telephone Company with both continuing to do business as Golden West Communications.
The Company entered into a new venture in 1995 when it partnered with Hector Communications of Hector, MN and Splitrock Telecom Cooperative of Garretson, SD in the purchase of Ollig Communications, a holding company that owned several telephone and cable television properties in Minnesota, Iowa and South Dakota. The companies purchased included Sioux Valley Telephone Company, Hills Telephone Company, Sleepy Eye Telephone Company and Loratel Systems. At the time of the original partnership, Hector owned 68% of the new company followed by Golden West with 20% and Splitrock Telecom with 12%. The 28,000 access lines and 8,200 cable TV accounts were operated under the name of Alliance Communications until July of 2003 when the properties were divided between the companies with Golden West acquiring 100% ownership of Sioux Valley Telephone and its cable TV subsidiary, Valley Cablevision. This acquisition added 5,300 access lines and 1,650 cable TV customers to Golden West�s total and further strengthened the Company�s presence in eastern South Dakota.
1996 and 1997 saw Golden West Communications (Vivian Telephone Company) further expand with the acquisition of several telephone properties from U S West Communications. Winner, Murdo, Burke, Bonesteel, Marion and Reliance were purchased in 1996 followed by the exchanges of Clearfield, Gregory, Lesterville and Witten in 1997, in all adding another 8,500 access lines to Golden West Communications.
Golden West was also successful in the FCC auction during this same timeframe acquiring Personal Communication Services (PCS) and Local Multi-point Distribution System (LMDS) licenses for portions of western South Dakota.
Recognizing the importance of being involved in the growth of the Internet, the Company became an Internet Service Provider (ISP) in 1996. That original involvement within its telephone service area has since grown with the May 2000 purchase of RapidNet and the September 2004 purchase of E-Net to now include some 10,000 dial-up and 6,000 high-speed DSL accounts.
The Company�s growth continued in 1999 when Golden West entered into a partnership with Long Lines of Iowa located in Sargent Bluffs, IA for the purchase and subsequent operation of The Jefferson Telephone Company in Jefferson, SD. Jefferson served 500 telephone and 200 cable television customers and was a 15% owner of the Sioux City Cellular MSA. That property was operated jointly until Golden West sold its interest in the Company to Long Lines in 2001.
2003 proved to be a busy year for Golden West, not just because the Company acquired 100% ownership of Sioux Valley Telephone Company, but also due to the purchase of a number of companies from MJD Services Corp., a wholly-owned subsidiary of FairPoint Communications. The purchase, comprised of customers of Union Telephone Company of Hartford, Kadoka Telephone Co., Armour Independent Telephone Co. and its subsidiary, Bridgewater-Canistota Independent Telephone Co., added another 4,150 access lines to Golden West�s total. The purchase also included an Internet company, Union TelNet Inc., in addition to approximately 700 cable television customers of WMW Cable TV Co. in Hartford.
Golden West Telecommunications has grown along with its subsidiaries to become the largest independent telephone company in South Dakota and the 35th largest telecommunications company in the nation serving some 48,000 access lines. The Company now employs nearly 350 people statewide offering services ranging from high-speed and wireless Internet, cable television, 24-hour answering service, Internet help desk, networking services, wholesale Internet services, paging and business phones systems to digital video recorders and security monitoring.
All in all, the Cooperative has expanded and changed considerably from that February 14, 1950 meeting in Quinn. One goal has, however, not changed, that being to provide its customers with the most dependable communications services at the lowest possible cost.
