News has traveled in a multitude of ways over the years.

From the fence post through the old “party line” on those rotary phones of the past.

At the beauty or barber shop.

And today, of course, through Facebook.

Years ago, small-town newspapers did their part in supplying the grapevine-type material that made for interesting discussions around the neighborhood.

In the early 1900s, a newspaper called The Mooreland Record carried town tidbits the likes of which you probably won’t find in any newspaper today.

The late Louise Murray (second-grade teacher of this writer at the old Mooreland School) once shared an April 6, 1906 copy of The Mooreland Record.

The “news” in this newspaper was certainly unique – at least by today’s standards.

The top of the front page contained two letters, one from a former Mooreland resident who had moved to California and another who was writing about his family’s move to Anderson. Then there were little one-sentence tidbits scattered throughout the paper. It was as good, if not better, than talking to your neighbor across the backyard fence.

Some of the more interesting and humorous tidbits included:

n “Florence Hodson transacted business in New Castle Tuesday.” When was the last time you made the papers by going shopping?

n “John Thalls is still confined to his room. He has had quite a siege of it.”

n “Vanderbeck & Son cried an auction sale north of Modoc, Tuesday.”

n “J.E. Rogers moved into Dora Haynes house Monday.”

n “John P. Smith is reported to be very low with consumption.”

n “The fine Stallion, “Major,” of Doc. Covalt & Sons is causing much comment among the farmers. He is certainly a fine horse.”

n “Harley Burch has a rag around his thumb. He says it was carelessness on his part that caused the hammer to strike it.”

n “Henry Main has had the trees trimmed in front of his residence.”

n “Dr. Spitler and Groendyke performed an operation on Joseph Koons, the son of Newton Koons for Emphysema of right lung, removing about two-thirds of a gallon of pus. The patient so far is doing fairly well.”

The publisher of this newspaper, H.E. Burton, wasn’t shy about editorializing. Here are some samples of his bold Mooreland prose.

n “We are informed that Harle Grey has purchased the Greensfork Journal and expects to move part of it here. We don’t know which part, but we presume it will be the part of the business he has yet to learn as at present he doesn’t know a pica lead from a 6 point 15 inch rule, let alone anything about a newspaper.”

n “Pat Crowe, having been acquitted, is now a mere ordinary citizen whom you wouldn’t go across the street to rubber at.”

n “Only seven train robberies in the county last year. When a man wants to rob a railroad now, he goes into Wall Street and sandbags the shareholders.”

n “One of the Richmond papers is charged with having gravely propounded the query ‘What shall a woman do after she is 40?’ The charge is not to be believed. It carries falsity on its face. There are no such women.”

Some of the societal problems written about in 1906 seem eerily familiar to some of the problems we have today, more than 100 years later. Here are a couple of items that would certainly qualify in “the more things change, the more they remain the same” department.

n “A 16-year-old boy in Detroit committed suicide the other day because of grief over the separation and probable divorce of his parents. Children of divorced parents do not often go to such desperate lengths, but their suffering is one of the tragedies of such affairs, which is too seldom taken into consideration.”

n “All over the country there are farms crying for tilling and there are few responses. The lure of the city has absorbed thousands of the best young people of the agricultural districts. If no plan is found for keeping young men and women on the farms, then a large scheme of emptying the cities of their poor should be evolved. It is one of the incomprehensible phases of the situation that no matter how poor and suffering the average family of the city slums may be, it prefers to suffer the miseries of the tenements rather than go out into the country where healthful employment awaits all and where the pure air will revive debilitated bodies and the sunshine win back the feeble ties of life.”

Darrel Radford is a staff writer for The Courier-Times and a board member of the Henry County Historical Society. For more local history or to read previous columns, go to the society’s website at www.henrycountyhs.org.