Threat to close beloved Pierce Co. Facebook group of 10K had a surprise ending

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It's weathered the COVID-19 pandemic, intense political divisions and community drama. It's where you go when you've lost your dog, need a helping hand or need a laugh. It makes a peninsula spanning 65 square miles, much of which only has one dwelling per ten acres, feel a little less like an island.
It's the Key Peninsula, Washington Facebook group.
'We had some marriages out of it,' Susan Freiler Mendenhall said, recalling when the group hosted a meet-up at a local restaurant, and a couple left together and later tied the knot. (She attended their wedding.) The Key Peninsula resident, age 70, has lived in the community for 38 years.
After 14 years of administering the Facebook group with a small team of other admins, keeping it 'family-friendly' and prohibiting profanity or discussions of partisan politics or religion, she finally believed it was time to bring it to an end. She posted in the group on July 7, announcing her intent to close the group of nearly 10,000 members by the end of the year. She explained that an accident in April left her hospitalized and dealing with some serious health issues. She figured participants could just switch over to other existing Facebook groups for Key Peninsula residents.
Her announcement sparked a flood of messages from people reaching out to tell her how much the group meant to them, she told The News Tribune. Several offered to become admins themselves.
'That surprised me,' she said.
It also got her thinking. Maybe she didn't need to close the group down. On July 23, she made another post in the group, announcing her intent to let it continue, with two new admins.
One of the new admins is Thomas Lancaster, a 25-year-old Key Peninsula resident who said he's been part of the group for going on a decade. His memory of the group goes back even farther, when his dad was part of the group, he said. One day, his dad lost a uniquely-designed cane that he used regularly to walk around and had owned for 30 years. The cane was special because it had grown directly off of a tree and wasn't 'something anyone carved or made,' Lancaster recalled.
'He put out posters and stuff and posted on the local Facebook page, and eventually somebody actually got back to him because they saw one of the posts,' he said.
There are many other stories about how the page has helped build community. In 2023, Key Peninsula resident Connor Wiley posted a fake message for an April Fools' Day prank saying that a stalled restaurant project, 2 Margaritas, had finally opened, The News Tribune reported. After the post gained traction, Richard and Cheryl Miller added to the conversation and announced they'd be making tacos for the community in the 2 Margaritas parking lot. They served nearly 150 tacos in the first 90 minutes.
'And did I mention how many lost dogs we've reunited with owners? Often it's one a week!' Freiler Mendenhall wrote in a follow-up message to The News Tribune. She added that neighbors have helped one another through power outages, getting stuck in snow and running out of gas.
Some time ago, Freiler Mendenhall started the 'Blue Tarp Awards' as a way to recognize those who did 'something outstanding in the group.' The name came after someone left the Facebook group in a fury, posting that they would 'rather not be associated with you kp elitist trash,' and members started joking about 'how the KP had a lot of blue tarps, or how you had to own a blue tarp to live in the KP,' Freiler Mendenhall wrote.
They later adopted a blue tarp as the group's flag, and would put one up during meet-ups, she said.
During the COVID-19 pandemic, the group started a new tradition: Meme Mondays, to give people something to do, she said. And they've always had Traffic Tuesdays, a designated day to share traffic-related concerns and prevent traffic from dominating the discussion every day.
A particular guardrail has become a running joke on the page. The barrier is on the right side of state Route 302, a mile or so coming off of the Purdy Bridge toward Key Center.
'Someone always hits it,' Freiler Mendenhall wrote. 'We ran a contest once to guess what date it would get destroyed again.'
Other community groups spawned from the Key Peninsula, Washington group, including Key Pen It Clean, a group that gathers volunteers to clean up local roads. Volunteers recently collected 50 trash bags across 3 miles on Lackey Road and the Key Peninsula Highway, the group posted on July 13. Key Pen It Flavorful was another subgroup that exchanged meal photos and recipes.
Another group, KP Cares, came together after Key Peninsula resident Mindy Taylor had the idea of raising money for victims of the Oso landslide in 2014.A bake sale raised over $3,700 in two days, and additional donations through Facebook brought the total to $4,000, according to The News Tribune's archives.
Taylor joined forces with Freiler Mendenhall, Sylvia Wilson and Marilyn Hartley, and they started the KP Cares group to raise funds for other residents in crisis on the Key Peninsula.
KP Cares became a 501(c)(3) organization, stating that its purpose or mission was to 'help people in crisis with resources and financial assistance, primarily on the Key Peninsula,' and that funds 'will be raised primarily through bake sales, car washes, and donations from local businesses.'
Taylor posted in the Key Peninsula, Washington group in 2021 that she was closing down KP Cares in September of 2021. By then, the group had raised $55,000 for residents in crisis, she wrote.
'We have been able to assist with rent, mortgage payments, power bills, funeral expenses, and Christmas gifts,' Taylor wrote in the post. 'During the heat wave we provided 25 fans for our vulnerable residents.'
Freiler Mendenhall said that the community is grieving Taylor's passing from cancer this month. Hartley, one of the other founders of KP Cares, died in June 2022, according to her obituary in the Key Peninsula News.
Lancaster, the 25-year-old Key Peninsula resident who offered to be a new admin, said he wants the Key Peninsula, Washington Facebook group to remain 'a good community resource.'
The page has always been family-friendly, hasn't allowed profanity and asks users to steer clear of partisan politics or religion as topics of discussion, Freiler Mendenhall said. Lancaster said he believes a good admin is one who's impartial and keeps personal opinions or feelings from affecting how one monitors the page.
'I'm not too worried about it,' Lancaster said. 'You just got to police it a little bit.'
Freiler Mendenhall has had to do a fair share of that. She recalled the admins years ago spending 'a lot of time personally asking people to tone it down' or trying to get them to understand the group's purpose and parameters for appropriate participation.
'We've gone through a couple of periods where people chose a subject and then hung on to it to the point where we needed to intervene and so some people were removed,' Freiler Mendenhall said.
She had an experience recently where someone whom she described as 'a very decent person' took over the page and began posting in the group 'as if it was their own personal profile.' She tried talking to the person in private, but the person's constant messages took up a lot of her time. And it gets old when upset users talk badly about you in other groups, she continued.
' ... it's probably what contributed to me thinking I got to stop doing this,' she said.
Asked if a recent dispute that played out on the Facebook page about flags on Purdy Bridge affected her decision, she said 'no, not at all.'
The News Tribune reported that some two dozen rainbow Pride flags appeared on the Purdy Bridge in mid-June and were taken down shortly after, leading to speculation on social media about who might have removed them. The Washington State Department of Transportation confirmed that state employees took down Pride flags on the bridge between June 10 and June 11 because it is illegal to attach flags or banners to state-owned bridge structures.
Most of the time the members of the Key Peninsula, Washington Facebook group know what to do, Freiler Mendenhall said.
'That's probably one of the biggest reasons I'm not as active is that the members self-regulate,' she said. 'They know the rules and they tell each other what the rules are.'
The News Tribune's archives contributed to this report.
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