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- The company, which started as a small telephone service in 1958, has expanded into fiber optics, media, and other local investments.
- Family members also hold influential state-level positions, including roles on the Broadband Expansion Council and the state board of regents.
- Despite its growth and influence in southwest Oklahoma, the company remains headquartered in its hometown of Medicine Park.
MEDICINE PARK — A family-owned communications company is sticking to its small-town roots while pulling off a quick succession of acquisitions that extends its reach into fiber optics, radio and newspapers throughout southwest Oklahoma.
In just the past 60 days, Hilliary Communications under its co-CEOs Dustin and Edward Hilliary acquired the Oklahoma operations of a Wisconsin telecom company and then proceeded to buy the Lawton Constitution newspaper and struck an agreement to buy eight radio stations.
At the same time, the family’s political influence continues to grow with Dustin Hilliary recently being named a senior adviser to Gov. Kevin Stitt, who previously appointed him to the state board of regents.
Chad Warmington, president of the Oklahoma State Chamber, credits the Hilliary family with bringing “high-speed, high-quality” broadband access in rural towns across the state.
“What’s so great about Dustin and Eddie’s story overall is that they took this sleepy rural telephone company and turned it into a major, yet predominantly rural broadband company,” Warmington said. “They’ve been pushing for development of high-speed development for years. They’ve been at the forefront of making sure that the areas that need to get served get served.”
That involvement in expanding rural internet access was also cited by Stitt when he appointed Mike Hilliary, Dustin’s cousin and executive vice president at the company, to represent wireless internet providers on the Broadband Expansion Council. Stitt also appointed Edward Hilliary Jr. to the State Board for Career and Technology and to the commission overseeing Oklahoma State Bureau of Investigation.
Warmington said the family’s growing civic role and expansion into news and information fits their commitment to the interests of southwest Oklahoma.
“I think they do a really good job trying to make sure that rural Oklahoma, where they are focused, is well informed about what is going on locally,” Warmington said. “Equally important, they inform what’s going on at the Capitol and how it impacts them. And they’re expanding their engagement knowing that their part of the state needs to be represented in Oklahoma City.”
Despite their company’s sprawling media and communications operations, the Hilliary family is not well known in Oklahoma City and Tulsa, even though in southwest Oklahoma they have long provided the largely rural communities in that part of the state with a connection to the world.
Driving into Medicine Park, visitors are introduced to the family via the Edward A. Hilliary Jr. Memorial Highway, named after the company founder and the first mayor of the small resort town.
“The Hilliary family has been fantastic to Oklahoma,” Stitt told KSWO during a 2022 celebration of the renaming of the highway. “They’re personal friends of mine. I certainly wanted to come down and celebrate with them, as they see their granddad’s name on the sign.”
In addition to Dustin and Mike Hilliary, the company is run by Dustin Hilliary’s cousin (and Mike’s brother), Edward E. Hilliary Jr., the company’s Co-CEO; Dustin’s father, Douglas Hilliary, board chairman; and Dacia Hilliary, Dustin’s sister and vice president over human relations.
From their new corporate headquarters, still in Medicine Park, the family also operates a broadcast group consisting of Radio Oklahoma Ag Network and Radio Oklahoma News Network that provide programming for 55 radio stations and Oklahoma Energy Today — an online news site focused on the state’s energy industry. They also publish the weekly Southwest Ledger newspaper.
Their trucks can be seen throughout southwest Oklahoma, and the company Facebook page is filled with photos of employees participating in various small-town parades and sponsoring various events and fundraisers.
In addition to building fiber optic networks, investing in news and communications and providing telephone service throughout southwest Oklahoma, the family’s investment also includes farming, ranching and even construction of a 20,000-square-foot shopping center to provide the small city of Elgin with more retail opportunities.
Small-town communications giant started with a propane shop and convenience store
Dustin Hilliary recently sat down with The Oklahoman and explained his family’s company started out small and grew to a point where they either had to keep growing or sell out to a bigger company.
Edward A. Hilliary Jr. — nicknamed “Junior” — owned a propane company and convenience store when in 1958 he purchased Medicine Park’s telephone company from the town’s electric utility.
“My grandfather was a young entrepreneur, and he saw the telephone company come up for sale,” Dustin Hilliary said. “Back then, there were little mom and pop home telephone companies all over, so he bought the telephone company in Medicine Park. He stayed around Medicine Park his whole life, he never moved, and he was the town’s first mayor when they incorporated.”
By the late 1970s, Hilliary employed seven people. He then built a small headquarters, and as the company grew, it bought up and converted a church, school, gas station and house into additional office space.
Junior Hilliary then jumped on the opportunity to provide community antenna television (CATV), a predecessor to cable television, to the town in the early 1980s.
“You put an antenna on the side of town and then put coaxial down,” Dustin Hilliary said. “It was basically taking off the air channels and getting them into town. And they did that in surrounding towns.”
Dustin and Edward E. Hilliary Jr., meanwhile, got their start at the bottom rung of the company.
“We started digging ditches, hooking up wires, cleaning and doing whatever needed to be done,” Dustin Hilliary said. “When guys tell us this is too hard, well, we’ve done that.”
In his later years, Junior Hilliary turned his attention to farming and cattle ranching. And when he died in 2005, his family faced a decision — grow or sell.
“We looked for ways to grow,” Dustin Hilliary said. “We were the second-smallest telephone company in the state at the time. There were 30 different companies around the state at the time that were privately owned. And those never come up for sale. We always thought, if we ever get another company up for sale and we don’t know how we will pay for it, but we’ve got to buy it.”
Their first acquisition would be Oklahoma Western Telephone, which, oddly, served smaller communities in eastern Oklahoma.
“It came up for sale in 2016, the first time in 90 years,” Dustin Hilliary said. “The guy who started it moved from western Oklahoma and didn’t want to change its name. That was our springboard. We got to where we can do an acquisition, keep the local technicians and the people in the market and run it back here in Medicine Park.”
The company looked for loans and grants offered through the U.S. Department of Agriculture and other agencies to grow its operations, starting with a grant to build a communications network in Tatum, a town of just over 100 in south central Oklahoma.
“We look for opportunities where the government is looking to build out infrastructure, and we raise our hands — we’ll build here in Oklahoma,” Dustin Hilliary said. “I believe we’ve had the most approved applications in the country.”
Hilliary Communications spreads its operations in 2025
The company’s purchase of telecommunications operations in Oklahoma from Wisconsin-based TDS started a wave of expansion over the summer of this year that is ongoing with $250 million being spent on new infrastructure.
TDS, Dustin Hilliary said, is “bigger, publicly traded” version of Hilliary Communications that had acquired companies all across the United States. The purchase of TDS’s properties added 35,000 new locations to Hilliary Communications’ service footprint in Oklahoma, Texas and Iowa. It is the company’s eighth acquisition of independent or regional telecom assets since 2016.
“They were looking to refocus in some of their markets, do some fiber build-outs in Wisconsin and Illinois and divest some of their other markets,” Dustin Hilliary said. “At one point, in their heyday, they probably had 100 employees down here.”
The newspaper and radio acquisitions, meanwhile, reflect Dustin Hilliary’s lifelong interest in staying informed about community news and events in southwest Oklahoma. The company’s first newspaper acquisition was of the Comanche County Chronicle in Elgin after the murders of its publisher, John Hruby, his wife and teenage daughter.
“I grew up reading the paper — The Lawton Constitution and The Oklahoman,” Dustin Hilliary said. “We used to have it delivered here. Elgin is kind of part of our home, that’s where our kids go to school. We could cover local stuff and keep people engaged.”
As they assumed control of the Elgin newspaper, coverage shifted to state House and Senate races and the teacher walkouts staged in response to low pay.
“We were doing some real political stories for what was just a regular weekly newspaper,” Dustin Hilliary said. “We posted debates, and we were mission creeping out of Elgin.”
It was then that the paper’s name was changed to the Southwest Ledger with a focus on business and politics.
“What do people always want to read? Who are your target readers?” Dustin Hilliary asked. “It’s business folks and those in politics.”
The Lawton Constitution, Dustin Hilliary said, was a natural addition to the company’s holdings.
“We looked at this as an opportunity to buy it and roll it into our fold,” Dustin Hilliary said. “We have the scale here that can help the newspaper continue for a long time with our back-office support.”
In just a few short weeks, JJ Francais, assistant vice president of external affairs at Hilliary Communications, has taken over as publisher of The Lawton Constitution and reports he has already tripled the size of the news staff.
“People ask, are you going to change it? And I say ‘No, we just want to restore it back to its glory days,’” Dustin Hilliary said. “We’re not going to change the name. We’re not going to change the domain; we’re not going to change anything other than maybe add some reporters and a cameraman and give them whatever they need to conquer. We want to give southwest Oklahoma a voice.”
Hilliary hopes to soon have his own radio stations to air their broadcast programming with an upcoming purchase of 12 AM and FM rock, country, R&B and talk stations. He also believes the radio stations can act as a platform to tease upcoming stories in their newspapers. He also hopes to add some conservative hosts based in southwest Oklahoma to the talk stations.
Hilliary Communication stays rooted in Medicine Park
The company’s current headquarters opened in 2023, replacing one the “Junior” Hilliary built in the late 1970s to provide more space for the electronics needed to operate the business.
“When he built it, he had about seven or eight employees,” Dustin Hilliary said. “Today we have between 160 and 170.”
Dustin Hilliary said the company’s historic ties to Medicine Park remain are still valued by family and though their new headquarters isn’t in the historic heart of the historic town, it is still within the town’s city limits.
“We looked at Lawton and worked with an economic development team that was great,” Dustin Hilliary said. “They had for us a really great deal. But we are still really just rural guys at the end of the day. We were looking at a four-story building that’s just not us.”
When people drive up to the headquarters, they inevitably travel the Edward A. Hilliary Jr. Memorial Highway and when they arrive, they stop at 529 Telephone Park, an ode the area’s original telephone prefix.
Medicine Park, meanwhile, has turned into one of the state’s top vacation spots thanks to its colorful history as a destination for politicos and gangsters (including Bonnie and Clyde) during the early 1900s, its cobblestone buildings and trails along Medicine Creek and Bath Lake.
The town was started as a resort by Elmer Thomas, a pioneering state and U.S. senator whose reputation as a host, according to the Encyclopedia of Oklahoma History and Culture, earned him the nickname of “the Sage of Medicine Park.”
Thomas’ home in the community, a two-story cobblestone house, is in the heart of the town and has a balcony with a view that oversees Bath Lake.
“Elmer Thomas was instrumental in getting the first federal dollars for this state,” Dustin Hilliary said. “It’s why Lake Lawtonka (just north of Medicine Creek) was the first dam built in this state. Because of him there is a fish hatchery here. He was a larger-than-life figure.”
Dustin Hilliary said his family is focused on keeping southwest Oklahoma and its largest city, Lawton, moving forward and not stagnating. His decision to volunteer his time on the state regents board, he said, is partially inspired by his support for Cameron University in Lawton.
“We try to be good corporate citizens,” Dustin Hilliary said. “The metros in Oklahoma City and Tulsa are doing really well as are some rural parts of the state. But Lawton and some of these areas are not really growing. The economies are not booming quite like in other areas of the state. It’s a fight for survival. All of us working together is key.”
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