ORIGINS OF MEMORIAL DAY
G'day folks,
Ever wondered about the origins of Memorial Day?
According to
the U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs, approximately 25 cities and
towns—including two named Columbus, one in Mississippi, one in Georgia—claim to
have originated Memorial Day in the years immediately before Grand Army of the
Republic leader John A. Logan designated May 30, 1868, as a day “for the
purpose of strewing with flowers, or otherwise decorating the graves of
comrades who died in defense of their country during the late rebellion.”
The idea for
Memorial Day (known as Decoration Day in the 1800s) did not arise with General
Logan; he had been inspired by local commemorations of Civil War dead already
being held in pockets throughout the North and the South, in some cases before
the war had even concluded. Logan, in fact, had delivered the keynote address
at an April 29, 1866, Decoration Day commemoration in Carbondale, Illinois, in
which Union Army veterans paraded in tattered uniforms and spread flowers on
cemetery graves.
Logan’s wife wrote in her 1913 memoir that she had suggested
the holiday after becoming so moved by “the little flags and the withered
flowers that had been laid” on Confederate graves in Petersburg, Virginia.
Boalsburg, Pennsylvania, claims the holiday originated there even earlier when
in 1864 a teenager mourning her Union Army father and a mother honoring her son
who fell at Gettysburg laid flowers on their graves and began an annual town
tradition.
The federal
government weighed in on the debate 50 years ago when President Lyndon B.
Johnson signed a May 26, 1966, proclamation that “officially recognized that
the patriotic tradition of observing Memorial Day began one hundred years ago
in Waterloo, New York.”
The small Finger Lakes village first staged an annual community-wide
commemoration of its war dead on May 5, 1866, when businesses shuttered and
residents draped buildings in black crepe and adorned soldiers’ graves with
flowers and flags. Although Congress designated Waterloo, now home to the
National Memorial Day Museum, as the holiday’s birthplace, the other contenders
haven’t been dissuaded. The argument over who gave birth to Memorial Day
remains a holiday tradition.
Clancy's comment: Notwithstanding the origins, may they rest in peace.
I'm ...
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