In Iowa, not to have a telephone is to belong to what a Londoner would call the "submerged tenth" of the population.

Second in line comes Illinois, with Kansas, Nebraska, and Indiana following closely behind; and at the foot of the list, in the matter of farm telephones, are Connecticut and Louisiana.
The first farmer who discovered the value of the telephone was the market gardener.

Next came the bonanza farmer of the Red River Valley--such a man, for instance, as Oliver Dalrymple, of North Dakota, who found that by the aid of the telephone he could plant and harvest thirty thousand acres of wheat in a single season.

Then, not more than half a dozen years ago, there arose a veritable Telephone Crusade among the farmers of the Middle West.

Cheap telephones, yet fairly good, had by this time been made possible by the improvements of the Bell engineers; and stories of what could be done by telephone became the favorite gossip of the day.