Address: 8209 Valley Pike, Middletown (Frederick County), VA
(Along route I-81, about 13 mi. SW of Winchester, VA.)
Latitude: N39-01-04 (39.0178)
Longitude: W78-17-29 (-78.2914)
Elevation: 714 ft.
Callsign WMQ420.
Middletown's physical facilities consist of a large, modern one-story building, a parking lot, and two short self-supporting towers, each tower holding a pair of conical reflector horn antennas. The building's style is unusual among AT&T facilities, and can be explained by the fact that it was built and first used by Western Union.
Historian George P. Oslin, in "The Story of Telecommunications" (p. 417), writes:
The U.S. Post Office Department and Western Union jointly started a Mailgram Service January 1, 1970 which telegraphed mail to area points from which messages were delivered by mail. In 1975, 22.6 million mailgrams were sent. In 1972 the company built a large computer switching center to handle all telegraph messages at Middletown, Virginia, and phased out its fifteen reperforator switching centers.
According to an AT&T news release, WU's "Middletown Operations 102" became an AT&T facility in 1991, supporting the company's EasyLink service.
Middletown is now a web server co-location facility for AT&T's commercial web-hosting business.
The thick black lines represent currently-licensed paths
Updated on April 24, 2000 at 20:00 by Albert LaFrance