Your Grandmother’s Facebook Wall Was the Local Paper

If you lived in Woodward, Oklahoma in 1925, you didn’t need Facebook to know who was in town you just needed the morning paper.

 

Back then, “social media” came folded in black-and-white and smelled faintly of fresh ink. Flip to the “People Notes” column in the Woodward News, and you'd find a feed that today would feel shockingly familiar:

 

• Mrs. J.T. Langford is visiting her daughter in Kansas City.

• Little Tommy Reynolds is home with the flu.

• The Johnsons had out-of-town guests from Enid this weekend.

 

It was the town’s original newsfeed — a curated scroll of life updates, posted not by users, but by an editor with a typewriter and a keen eye for who went where and why it mattered.

 

There were no profile pics. No comment threads. No hashtags. Just names, places, and tiny glimpses into people’s lives.

 

But it meant everything.

 

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A Status Update Worth Printing

 

To modern readers, it might sound quaint or even absurd that someone’s Sunday visit to a cousin made the paper. But in 1925, these details were gold. They were how you knew your community.

 

In small towns like Woodward, the People Notes were front-page Facebook. They tracked who was ill, who’d returned from war, who had visitors, and who hadn’t a kind of social heartbeat for the entire community.

 

Everyone read it. Everyone noticed. And yes everyone cared.

A neighbor’s absence in the column might spark a visit. A name you hadn’t seen in a while might trigger a casserole delivery. Social care wasn't crowdsourced it was community-powered.

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Before Algorithms, There Was Aunt Mildred

 

There was no algorithm deciding what you saw. No targeted ads or dopamine loops. If your name showed up in the People Notes, it was because someone thought your story mattered even if that story was just about a trip to Tulsa.

 

And while today’s platforms run on speed and spectacle, back then, the smallest stories made the biggest impact.

 

A church potluck. A new baby. A successful harvest. A cold.

 

These weren’t just trivial footnotes. They were affirmations of connection.

 

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The Newsfeed We Didn’t Know We Lost

 

In many ways, Woodward in 1925 felt more connected than we are now not in bandwidth, but in belonging.

 

The paper didn’t just report on the town — it reflected it. Line by line, neighbor by neighbor.

 

We’ve come a long way since then smartphones, selfies, saturation. But maybe, just maybe, your grandmother’s Facebook wall a.k.a. the local newspaper  had something we’ve lost in the scroll:

intimacy without intrusion, attention without agenda, and community without comment sections.

 

So the next time you post an update, remember: 100 years ago, someone might’ve done the same thing...

Only their post came with a headline, a printing press, and a whole town reading along.

 

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