Before the famous fire of June 1915, the south side of Main Street west of Watts Hall housed a telegraph building, while the telephone office was separate for unknown reasons, perhaps because the telegraph office handled only telegrams and not local telephones. In the 1990s, after a lightning strike burned the steeple of Thomaston Baptist Church, firefighters discovered a mass of wires there. Investigation revealed that telephone operators had a lever in their office connected to those wires in the steeple more than a block away, and when a fire was reported they could pull the lever to make a striker ring the church bell chime, summoning the town's volunteer firemen to duty.