DTMFall'25_Final - Flipbook - Page 14
Ice Carriage Pulled by Horse. Photo Courtesy of RareHistoricalPhotos.com
James L. Millspaugh started the San Angelo Water
Works Company in 1884, which was consolidated
into the San Angelo Water, Light and Power
Company in 1898. Millspaugh also owned the San
Angelo Ice Factory, and caused outrage among
saloon owners over his fee of five cents per pound.
In response, the saloon keepers began shipping in
200 pounds of ice per day from Abilene at a cost of
three cents per pound until Millspaugh met their
price.
The water and electric facility rented and later
bought a dam and the lake it formed, called Lake
Concho, from Charles B. Metcalfe, for whom the
long bridge over the river on Avenue L is named.
West Texas Utilities bought out San Angelo Water,
Light and Power in 1924 and operated until 1951
when the city bought the facilities. West Texas
Utilities was responsible for the construction of
the Lake Nasworthy Dam, completed in 1930, and
which saved the city from complete catastrophe
during the flood of September 1936. “The West
Texas Utilities Company considered that the dam
had withstood the worst flood in its history and
given an excellent account of itself,” reported the
San Angelo Evening Standard on September 15, 1936.
Henry Batjer was acting superintendent of WTU at
the time; he partnered with Bernard Trimble in
1954 to form Trimble-Batjer Insurance, and the
company went on to purchase the San Angelo
National Bank Building on the corner of Twohig
and Chadbourne, according to the company
website.
Another vital part of the city’s infrastructure was a
sewage system, begun sometime around 1895 and
called the Lasker Line after Marcus Lasker, a
Galveston land investor who owned several
storefronts on Concho and Chadbourne. He, along
with Louis Schwartz, Joseph Raas, J. W. Johnson,
James Millspaugh, and John R. “Sarge” Nasworthy,
were the initial founders of San Angelo National
Bank, while M. B. Pulliam was the second President
to serve the bank. Pulliam made his first cattle
drive to Kansas at the tender age of 14 and later
owned a 50,000-acre ranch with 7,000 head of
cattle. The Lasker line was purchased by the San
Angelo Sewer Company in 1900, and the city
subsequently took it over in 1925.
Early Phone Used by Alexander Graham Bell, Inventor of Telephones.
Photo Courtesy of AdobeStock.com
The first telephone service in San Angelo was
operated around 1887 by F. O. Perry, who later
became the Western Union agent. W. W. Irwin ran
a hand-operated system serving about 75
customers, each with their own line. Irwin was
bought out by the Rust brothers in 1899 for
$5,200, and they began the San Angelo Telephone
Company. In 1901, John Y., Jerry, and Lew Rust,
along with John W. Sims, filed a charter for the
telephone company, listing capital stock of $8,000
as reported on July 12 by the Fort Worth Record and
Register. On July 10, 1910, the same publication
reported that “there are few corporations in Texas
which have achieved such splendid success . . .
[t]oday it has a list of 1,500 subscribers in this city
and 1,600 in the thirteen other exchanges which
the company operate . . . All told, the company has
more than 900 miles of pole lines” and was
employing around 75 people. By 1918, the San
Angelo Evening Standard reported that the
corporation once “operated only in San Angelo, and
many of the boxes used for telephones were
contraptions made from cigar boxes,” was worth
$400,000, had 1,500 miles of cable, provided
weather forecasts and fire alarm alerts and,
through connections with the Bell systems, was in
“direct communication with the entire nation”
(February 14, 1918).
