Small Maine Town Of Wytopitlock Does Away With Its Payphone

Really, who ya gonna call anyway?

People in the tiny town of Wytopitlock, northeast of Lincoln and Mattawamkeag somewhere off Route 2,  have decided to do away with one of the few remaining payphones in the state. The "Public Interest Phone," which is apparently what a payphone is called nowadays, will be ripped from the side of the Reed Plantation Volunteer Fire Department and replaced with a candy/snack machine.

The majority of the population of Wytopitlock, all 140 of them, hadn't even realized that the much ignored payphone was even available, including  Diane Hines, the town manager of Reed Plantation.  “The only time I had heard about it is when the police came to my office looking for someone,” Hines told TheCounty.me in reference to the time someone dialed 911 from it.

So town officials contacted the Public Utilities Commission and worked out the eventual removal of the antiquated public interest payphone doohickey thingy.

A Pepsi machine was installed outside the volunteer fire department recently and the firefighter there are excited to get a new snack machine to compliment it. Apparently, one has to drive many miles from Wytopitlock to either Lincoln or Houlton for a Snickers bar and a bag of chips.

At the time, the Public Interest Phone was one of 35 across the state that was meant to provide communication in rural areas, and of course now there's cell coverage, even in Wytopitlock, 86 miles northwest of Bangor.

So while the end of an era seems to have come in this small town, it's nice to know that now when one is driving through the swarm of black flies on route 171, one can stop and buy a handful of Gummy Bears.