If you visit D & P Communications’ main office on Teal Road in Petersburg today, you’ll find a state-of-the-art data center with a large staff working hard to provide the best quality service to customers across Lenawee and Monroe counties. But did you know that for our first 73 years in existence, we didn’t even have an office?
As you may know, D & P started in 1898 as the Deerfield Farmers Telephone Company. At the time, it was an alliance of local farmers setting up party lines, with 10 households sharing each line. The company was owned by its subscribers, and every household with a phone owned one share of stock. The value of one share back then is 330 shares today.
It wasn’t until 1971 that the company began to need a central office. That first office was run out of a house in Deerfield, with just five employees.
Thirteen years later, in 1984, we moved into an office in downtown Petersburg. Today it’s the home of Iott Insurance. That was a time of rapid expansion for D & P — and also rapid improvement in telephone technology. Buried lines and the advent of fiber optics made phone service much more reliable and convenient.
In 1995 we began providing Cable TV and Internet service, and in 1999 we purchased the land in Petersburg where our current main office sits. The property is 32 acres, 20 of which are used for farming. Our expansion continued when we purchased Charter, which had been providing service in Blissfield. We then began expanding to more areas that were interested in our services, including Morenci, Dundee, Hudson, Britton, Palmyra, Riga, Tecumseh, Adrian and Clinton.
Today, our main office in Petersburg is the hub of a 55-employee operation that provides fast, reliable phone, Internet and Cable TV service to more than 10,000 customers. We also have local offices in Adrian, Blissfield, Dundee and Tecumseh. But even though both we and our offices have grown, we’re still the friendly, locally owned company you’ve come to know — providing good service to our neighbors one person at a time!
