The steel towers visible here supported curtain antennas.  There were twenty-six of these 180-foot-tall towers placed about 250 ft apart.  The road running diagonally across the bottom right of the image is Keefe Road.

Image Courtesy of AT&T Archives and History  Center.

This photo shows original Sterba (or curtain) antennas on the left and the first rhombic antenna  on the top right – this one transmitted to Bermuda. Rhombic antennas (named for their shape when viewed from above) had a better performance, lower cost, and smaller footprint. A single rhombic antenna required eight 80 foot poles and covered about 5 acres. 

In 1939, the curtain antennas were torn down and replaced with double rhombic antennas which became the standard for long distance transmission.

Image Courtesy of AT&T Archives and History Center.

Land continued to be cleared to make room for more rhombic antennas. A number of farmhouses now located on Cold Soil, Blackwell and Keefe Roads were moved off the Pole Farm.  By the 1960s there were more than 2,000 poles. Farmer William Uhry (third from left) cultivated land adjacent to the station – the farm equipment visible here is his tomato planter.

Image Courtesy of AT&T Archives and History Center.

While the steel towers were most visible, it was the curtain antennas that hung between them that did the work.  While working with shortwave radio, engineers had to account for the fact that different wavelengths worked better at different points of the day (due to the changes in the Earth’s ionosphere).  To solve this problem, Ernest Sterba created an antenna made of a fine wire mesh that could be raised and lowered as the transmitter frequencies were changed according to the time of day. Winches and cables (from the Roebling factory in Trenton) raised and lowered the curtains.

Image Courtesy of Marie Hutnik & Family.

Andrew Hutnik, photographer