Only 100 miles away from Gettysburg, this small abolitionist community suffered multiple causalities throughout the Civil War. On the chosen date, April 26, observances were held in Atlanta, Augusta, Macon, Columbus and elsewhere in Georgia as well as Montgomery, Alabama Memphis, Tennessee Louisville, Kentucky New Orleans, Louisiana and Jackson, Mississippi.īoalsburg, PA in October 1864. It was reprinted by papers in several Southern states, and the plans were noted in newspapers in the North as well. The Ladies Memorial Association of Columbus members in a letter to newspapers in March 1866 asked for assistance in establishing an annual holiday to decorate the graves of soldiers throughout the South. Another Southern city named Columbus is credited by the United States National Park Service and numerous scholars for beginning Memorial Day observances in the South. Logan of the Union Army, led a procession to the town's Woodlawn Cemetery, where a number of Civil War soldiers had been interred.Ĭolumbus, GA in March 1866. Returning veterans, inspired by the sight of a young woman with infants at a small, unmarked grave in a church yard cemetery placing flowers and kneeling in prayer next to it, organized a memorial service to honor those who had died in the Civil War. Some have therefore claimed that President Abraham Lincoln was the founder of Memorial Day.Ĭarbondale, IL in 1866. The National cemetery dedication there included a ceremony of commemoration at the graves of dead soldiers. Regardless, mention of the observance is inscribed on the southeast panel of the Confederate Monument in Jackson, erected in 1891. However, the earliest recorded reference to this event did not appear until many years after. One Sue Landon Vaughan is said to have decorated the graves of Confederate and Union soldiers. Women decorated the graves at Laurel Grove Cemetery of comrades who died at Battle of Manassas (First Battle of Bull Run). (John Quincy Marr at the Battle of Fairfax Courthouse. The first Civil War soldier's grave ever to be decorated, according to a Richmond Times-Dispatch article in 1906, for the first soldier killed in action during the Civil War. Some other contenders include the following: In 1966, 100 years after the town of Waterloo, New York, first shuttered its businesses and took to the streets for the first of many continuous, community-wide celebrations, President Johnson signed Congressional legislation declaring that tiny upstate village the “official” birthplace of Memorial Day One has even received federal recognition. All told, more than 20 towns claim to be the holiday’s birthplace. The gatherers sang hymns, gave readings and distributed flowers around the cemetery, which they dedicated to the "Martyrs of the Race Course."įor almost as long as there’s been an observance, there’s been a rivalry over who celebrated it first. Conditions at one camp were such that more than 250 prisoners died from disease or exposure and had been buried in a mass grave behind the track’s grandstand.
Near the war's end, thousands of Union soldiers held as prisoners of war had been herded into a series of hastily assembled camps on the site of a former racetrack in Charleston. Colored Troops (including the Massachusetts 54th Infantry) and a group of white Charlestonians, gathered at a former war prisoner detention camp in Charleston, SC to consecrate a burial site for Union dead.
Three weeks after the Confederate surrender, on May 1, 1865, more than 1,000 people recently freed from enslavement, accompanied by regiments of the U.S. Disturbed at the sight of the bare graves, the women placed flowers on their mounds as well.
Nearby were the graves of Union soldiers, neglected because they were the enemy. In Columbus, MS., April 25, 1866, it has been recorded that a group of women visited a cemetery to decorate the graves of Confederate soldiers who had fallen in battle at Shiloh. (All of the previous wars and conflicts fought by the United States combined barely add up to the body count the country suffered in the Civil War.)Ī few local springtime tributes to Civil War dead began even before hostilities had ceased. In the years following the end of the Civil War increasing numbers of American communities began ritually tending to the remains and graves of an unprecedented number of fallen soldiers. Arlington National Cemetery, Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons