Off the side of a dirt road in Southern Maryland stands an odd answer to the swiftly changing telecommunications industry.
It's a rusted metal chamber, nearly eight feet tall. The door is padlocked. Trees surround it, with no houses in sight. It looks like an old bomb shelter.
Inside is a telephone. Built by several nearby Mennonite families, the oil tank-turned-phone booth connects them to the rest of the world -- sort of. And sort of -- when it comes to the estimated 1,600 Old Order Mennonite and Amish residents who still ride horse-drawn buggies down the roads of St. Mary's County -- is the point.
In the past several years, they have quietly erected at least 12 similarly hidden, private phone booths, posting them behind barns, in the woods and, in one case, inside a former chicken coop.
The phones allow them to conduct business -- crucial to surviving amid the region's development pressures -- while holding on to prohibitions against home phone lines and cellphones. Called "community phones," they are the latest example of how the groups in Maryland and elsewhere have been cutting deals with technology for the past century.
It used to be that Old Order Mennonite and Amish families in St. Mary's relied on public, coin-operated pay phones. But as people migrated to cellphones, telecommunications companies took notice. On average, they remove more than 1,000 pay phones a year in Maryland, according to state records. Verizon, for example, plans to take out two pay phones along heavily-Amish Thompson Corner and Budds Creek roads in St. Mary's.
So the Amish and Mennonites are adapting.
