The History of Suttle
Suttle began in 1910; formed by Marion C. Suttle in Lawranceville, Illinois, a small town near the Indiana border. Marion resigned in the spring of 1910 as a telephone line and instrument trouble shooter from a mutual telephone company in McLeansboro, IL. He decided to go into business for himself and opened up a little telephone and electrical repair shop in one back office room upstairs over a butcher shop. Business was brisk from the beginning. New mutual and independent telephone companies were popping up all over the Midwest and he recognized that there was an opportunity for a good-sized business. For this purpose he needed to name his business and decided to call it: "The Suttle Equipment Company, dealers in and re-builders of telephone and electrical apparatus."
The company grew, modestly with business from the smaller independent and mutual operating companies in the region as well as several railroad companies, who were using telephone equipment for
train dispatching.
In December 1913, Mr. Suttle sold the business to a Mr. Knipe of Olney, IL and was incorporated in 1914 alongside the Commercial Telephone & Telegraph Company. Unfortunately, Mr. Suttle only worked at the newly formed group for only a year or so before he left and went on to work for General Motors and followed W.C. Durant when Mr. Durant broke away and started Durant Motors.
Over time, the company was sold to LeRoy T. Carlson, (founder of TDS Telecom), in Lawranceville, IL and later the North American Communications Corporation. In December 1969, Communications Systems Inc was formed by a small group of investors from Hector, MN, led by Curtis A. Sampson, to purchase Suttle Apparatus, Inc. from North American Cable Communications, (a division of Continental Telephone Corporation at the time) and the company moved its operations from Lawrenceville, IL to the headquarters in Hector, MN where NACC had been based.
The products and services Suttle Apparatus has offered over the years has remained true to its beginnings. In its early years, it was a limited supplier of telephony apparatus to the independent telephone companies in the US. In 1969, the supply of equipment to the Bell system was opened up to independent suppliers (outside of Western Electric), thanks to enforcement of Clayton Act, which created more space for suppliers like Suttle.
The term “apparatus” in the telephone operating company systems referred to the telephone equipment usually located on the premises of the user. Today, we also call this the Customer Premise Equipment
or CPE.
Today, Suttle remains a wholly owned subsidiary of Communications Systems, Inc. (CSI), a publicly traded company (NDAQ: JCS). Its primary operations remain in Hector, MN and include significant operations in Costa Rica, and a sales and marketing office in Minneapolis, MN. The company today is one of the first manufacturers capable of supplying the major service providers with a complete, high-quality offering of voice, data, and video connectivity CPE.
