Roseville Telephone Museum permanently closes. What happens to its historic collection?

A Roseville museum that spent decades preserving the history of telephone technology and one of the nation’s largest independent telephone companies has permanently closed.

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The 4,500-square-foot Roseville Telephone Museum at 106 Vernon St. chronicled the history of communication and telecommunications technology in the Sacramento region and beyond. It shut down to public visits in June, according to a statement from a museum spokesperson.

It was home to “the most extensive collections of antique telephones and memorabilia in the nation,” according to tourist information center Visit Placer, the county’s tourism board.

The museum’s four galleries included rare and antique telephones dating to 1876, including some designed by Alexander Graham Bell. The collection also included a working switchboard used by the Roseville Telephone Co. in 1914, which docents demonstrated for visitors, Ars Technica reported in 2018.

Roseville Telephone Co. — which grew out of earlier telephone ventures in the farming and ranching community — began assembling the museum’s collection in 1989 to preserve the history of telephone technology. The museum opened that year for guided tours and moved five years later from the basement of the company’s central exchange into its longtime home at 106 Vernon St.

The museum also chronicled the history of Roseville Telephone, a homegrown independent telephone company incorporated in 1914. Telephone service in Roseville predated the company. The city had 24-hour telephone service by 1911, when just 120 telephones served a population of more than 2,600, according to Ars Technica. By 1994, Roseville Telephone was the 25th-largest of 1,300 telephone companies in the United States and the third-largest in California, according to a Roseville Press-Tribune publication marking the company’s 80th anniversary. At the time, it was considered one of the nation’s largest independent telcos.

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Roseville Telephone became Roseville Communications in 1986 and SureWest Communications in 2000. SureWest expanded into internet and cable television service but faced costly competition from larger companies including AT&T and Comcast, according to previous Bee reporting. In 2012, Consolidated Communications agreed to acquire SureWest for $340.9 million, ending the run of a longtime Roseville-based corporate headquarters.

“We are working thoughtfully to ensure the museum’s historically significant artifacts find good homes with local museums and nonprofit organizations,” the museum’s statement said.

The museum’s workers are also “creating virtual educational materials to continue to tell the story about the history of telecommunications in our region,” according to the statement.

The museum was owned and operated by Consolidated’s privately-held successor, Illinois-based Fidium Fiber, according to the business’ description.

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