One fall day in late 2017, I recognized that a trend I had been following since the early 2000s was gaining traction. This trend was the wave of Memes that were sweeping the internet. Presidents and plebs like sharing their catchy messages attached to trendy photos. I decided to join in the fun with inspiration from other meme pages and a "Troll" page called Scumpas, which briefly poked fun at Scumpas' content.
Initially, the page was made to Meme about things in Winchendon that I wanted to see change and entertain a specific niche of people who understood Winchendon's inside jokes and dark humor. Some of the first Memes posted that gained traction included a side-by-side comparison of the sidewalk leading to Town Hall and the brand-new bike path, a highway yard sign made by a disgruntled employer about one of his employees, and comparing it to "Winchendon's version of Yelp" which lead to over a million engagements and thousands of shares from locals, truck drivers, and college kids who were attending NH colleges passing through Winchendon.
Other notable memes were nostalgic for the local area, mentioning businesses and hangouts that no longer existed: Kodys Castle, Lucky Dragon, and Black Bridge, but a purge of the Winchanon pages occurred when some locals threatened to find and expose the anonymous poster, contacting the police and threatening legal action over a meme.
After a short cool-off time and assuring legal rights and FB anonymity, Winchanon began posting again with the help of a handful of contributors throughout its existence, which again achieved back-to-back posts with millions of engagements and tens of thousands of interactions, including a photo of Donald Trump looking out of a plane window and the caption "Mexico is a shithole, that's Fitchburg Massachusetts Sir...", an image of rusty old heaters captions "Springfield MA," and a famous meme of a car taking a hard turn on the exit captioned "When you are speeding and see the Statie parked on the left of Exit 28".
Other notable memes were nostalgic for the local area, mentioning businesses and hangouts that no longer existed: Kodys Castle, Lucky Dragon, and Black Bridge, but a purge of the Winchanon pages occurred when some locals threatened to find and expose the anonymous poster, contacting the police and threatening legal action over a meme.
After a short cool-off time and assuring legal rights and FB anonymity, Winchanon began posting again with the help of a handful of contributors throughout its existence, which again achieved back-to-back posts with millions of engagements and tens of thousands of interactions, including a photo of Donald Trump looking out of a plane window and the caption "Mexico is a shithole, that's Fitchburg Massachusetts Sir...", an image of rusty old heaters captions "Springfield MA," and a famous meme of a car taking a hard turn on the exit captioned "When you are speeding and see the Statie parked on the left of Exit 28".
Winchanon took a break after the infamous posts and laid low. Infamy was not Winchanon's end goal, and instead of ripping apart Winchendon and the surrounding areas, I would like to build them up. Winchanon decided to use its 2,000 followers to promote New and Old businesses, highlight local events, and call out residents who share too much online (Mostly the Winchendon Residents Page on FB).
That was until Winchanon decided to promote a new, now-infamous Pizza Place in Town. The owner took offense to the free advertisement (Meme), which had nothing offensive or satirical. At the time, Winchanon had more followers than the local page "Winchendon Residents." Instead of being responsible business owners and decent humans by asking for it to be removed, they belittled and attacked everyone who engaged with the post. This sparked a war of memes targeting the business, and the business retaliated by threatening legal action and copyright infringement requests to FB on the entirety of Winchanon and all of its images and posts, including original memes from before the existence of the pizza place. This caused FB to act on the Winchanon account, permanently taking down many older memes and issuing strikes, which affected its search results monetization ability and throttled its content.
It didn't take long for the FB users to see the business owner's unprofessionalism and begin to make and share their memes and experiences. This was Winchanon's last big hoorah and the pizzagate of Winchendon, where multiple residents were "Banned" from said pizza place to voice their opinions.
Facebook is an ever-changing environment, landscape, and user base, now resulting in a more sensitive user focused less on parody and more on current happenings, local politics, and news businesses—things like loud, low-flying planes, missing black cats, scooter gang activity remain hot topics which leave little room for the content Winchanon once provided. The days of Music Forum's backroom, black bridge, and teens walking their baby carriages up and down Central Street jokes are long behind us, and it is time to pass the torch to the next page that recognizes an opportunity to attract an audience tailored to their experiences in Winchendon.
Despite the harsh nature of some of the tasteless jokes, Winchanon was a force for good and brought attention, laughter, and positive change in the Town. The famous "Tony" sign is down after Winchanon made it popular. The sidewalks were redone years after Winchanon brought attention to it. Businesses that deserve to flourish and places with poor customer service were ousted.
