The story
In 1844 Samuel Morse sent his famous telegraph message, and soon wires were stretching across America. News could suddenly travel faster than any horse. The plain word “grapevine,” meanwhile, had been in American records since 1654, in the town papers of Providence, Rhode Island.
Not everyone had a telegraph office nearby. News passed mouth to mouth was jokingly said to come by the “grapevine telegraph”—a humble, homegrown stand-in for the real thing. On April 17, 1852, the phrase turned up in two newspapers on the same day, one in Ohio and one in Indiana, which suggests people were already saying it.
During the Civil War, rumors flew through army camps. In 1862 a Union officer, James A. Connolly, wrote in his diary: “We get such ‘news’ in the army by what we call ‘grape vine,’ that is, ‘grape vine telegraph.’ It is not at all reliable.”
Over the years the telegraph part fell away. By the 1930s, plain “grapevine” meant the unofficial way news gets around.
