After more than half a century, the phone booth in Prairie Grove, Ark., is still operational
PRAIRIE GROVE, ARK. – What can you get for a quarter these days?
In Prairie Grove, Ark., you can make a phone call inside an Airlight Outdoor Telephone Booth.
The phone booth was installed in the late 1950s or early 1960s by the Prairie Grove Telephone Company. It was placed on the eastern side of Prairie Grove, near the Colonial Motel and the Prairie Grove Battlefield Park on U.S. Highway 62.
In the heyday of phone booths, there were more than a dozen coin-operated phones in Prairie Grove. Today, it’s one of only two working phone booths in the state, perhaps the only one.
The nostalgia of a phone booth isn’t its only unique feature.
The Airlight Outdoor Telephone Booth was introduced by American Telephone & Telegraph (AT&T) in 1954 to install public telephones in outdoor locations.
The Airlight was “Like a lighthouse on the highway,” according to a 1959 Bell Telephone advertisement touting the Airlight’s nighttime visibility.
Previously, telephones, including publicly accessible pay phone structures, were generally made of wood and only available indoors.
While public pay phones and phone booths were disappearing, the Prairie Grove phone booth remained and continued to be operational. Tragedy struck, however, in June 2014, and the fate of the phone booth was on hold.
The booth received extensive damage after being plowed by an SUV. The Prairie Grove Telephone Company considered removing the phone booth. Community members rallied around the piece of Americana, and the structure was repaired and restored to its original location, where it has been operational since.
In April 2015, the phone booth was submitted for nomination to the National Register of Historic Places by the state review board of the Arkansas Historic Preservation Program.
According to published reports, the National Parks Service, which administers the registry, wasn’t sure it qualified for the list, partially because there had never been a phone booth on the list. The Parks Service said the “listing blurs the line between a ‘place’ and an artifact, and it begs the questions about where the line between significance and nostalgia is drawn.”
Ralph Wilcox, the National Register/survey coordinator for the state’s Historic Preservation Program, resubmitted the nomination and had to convince the decision-makers that the phone booth is “truly significant,” emphasizing the Airlight “represented a new and advanced design for the telephone booth.”
In November 2015, the phone booth was added to the national registry, making it the first and only phone booth listed.
In 2016, because of a lack of revenue from the phone booth, the Prairie Grove Telephone Company announced it would no longer charge callers to use the Airlight for local calls.
Today, the phone booth is used more as a photo prop than a telephone, but it still stands as a symbol of the changing times and the community.
