Small phone companies in rural areas used tricky ringers to get phones to work on party lines (so that they could ring just one phone on the line). Those ringers usually won't work on a modern phone system.
Sometimes it's just moving a wire from one terminal to another; sometimes you have to find a plain-jane ("straight-line") replacement ringer.
Thank you for the information!!
I’ll be going back this week and will grab the phones.
I do have a landline connection so there’s a half-hope they may work.
This is going to be fun!