A movement began to form a rural telephone cooperative in Vernon County on March 15, 1950. A group of farmers met at Liberty Pole and decided to organize. Mr. N.F. Leifer, manager of Vernon Electric Cooperative of Westby, offered to serve as temporary manager and assisted in obtaining an REA loan. The first member meeting was held in April 1950, and the following board was elected: Ole Traastad, chairman; Martin Hanson, secretary-treasurer; Otto Harder, Genoa; Asa Harris, Viroqua; Ivan Fortun, Liberty Pole, Gus Massie, Genoa; and William E. Thompson, DeSoto. This group continued meeting on a regular basis, signed up members and filed Articles of Incorporation on October 25, 1951. The next 4 1/2 years involved many setbacks with the first REA loan not being approved until May 24, 1954.

Engineering was completed in 1955 for the design of a rural party line dial system in the DeSoto, Genoa, and Liberty Pole exchanges. The first annual meeting was held on February 25, 1956 with the board hiring Jerome Espe to supervise the construction of the first system. This system was placed into service in July of 1957 for the three exchanges. In 1958, the Cooperative purchased the LaFarge Telephone Company which was constructed to provide dial service. At the 1958 annual meeting Anthony Curti of Genoa was elected president, Milan Slayback of LaFarge, vice-president, and William Thompson of DeSoto treasurer-secretary. In April of 1959, negotiations were completed for the Viola and Readstown exchanges, which were converted to dial service in December 1960. In 1960 negotiations to merge with the Westby Telephone Company began; on July 7, 1961 this merge agreement was completed.

The general office was moved from Viroqua to Westby in December of 1961, and Vernon assumed management of the Westby Telephone Company on January 1, 1962. The Westby exchange was converted to dial service on May 1, 1963, with all new buried plant providing five party rural dial service. The Vernon Telephone original system of 700 phones had now grown to serve 3239 members with nine elected directors. IN 1967 Vernon merged with the Yuba Telephone Cooperative and completed its first all one party buried plant dial system, which was placed into service July 1, 1968.

In 1970, Vernon began converting all exchanges to one party service. This program was completed in December 1973, giving every member private line service and direct long distance dialing. The Vernon system operated unprofitably from 1957 through 1973. Through installation of the one party buried service which stimulated usage, the cooperative was able to start producing margins which have remained consistent.

In 1980, Vernon began plans to convert electro mechanical switches to digital, a program which was completed in 1987, bringing Vernon members most of the modern day services available anywhere in the United States. In 1990, plans began to replace high traffic routes with fiber optic cable. In 1992 and 1993, several miles of fiber optics were installed an placed into service.--Submitted by Jerome Espe. Taken from the book: Vernon County Heritage, copyright, 1994.

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