HOW MEMORIAL DAY GOT STARTED

Today is a holiday called Memorial Day, when a lot of people will be going to cemeteries to put flowers on graves.  Also a lot of people will have picnics and go camping or boating or to the swimming pool.  Nowadays, Memorial Day is kind of like the official beginning of summer, but that is not the real reason the holiday got invented.

Gettysburg National Cemetery

There are more than two dozen towns that claim to be the birthplace of Memorial Day, so it's kind of hard to know which town is right.  What we know for sure is that Memorial Day started right after the Civil War, except that it might have even started during the War, when some of the Southern women used to decorate the graves of the Confederate soldiers.

But Wikipedia, which is always right about everything, says that the first time Memorial Day was observed was on May 1, 1865, in Charleston, South Carolina.  And what happened that day was that a group of former slaves decorated the graves of 257 Union soldiers at Washington Race Course.  And that was the beginning of Decoration Day, which is what the holiday was originally called.

Meanwhile, in the North, Decoration Day got started in Waterloo, New York, on May 5, 1866.  Two years later, General John A. Logan, who was the commander-in-chief of a group of Union veterans called the Grand Army of the Republic, proclaimed Decoration Day a national holiday.  General Logan said that this holiday should be on May 30 every year, and he chose this date because it was not the anniversary of any Civil War battle.

General John Logan

On the first official Decoration Day after General Logan's proclamation, General James Garfield made a speech at Arlington National Cemetery, and then 5,000 people helped decorate the graves of more than 22,000 Union and Confederate soldiers.

The first state to recognize the new holiday was New York, in 1873, and by 1890, all the northern states had recognized it.  But the South did not want to do something just because the North was doing it, so each southern state decided on its own date for Decoration Day.

Things went on this way until after World War I, when the holiday got changed so that it was for remembering the dead soldiers from all wars.  In 1971, Congress passed the National Holiday Act, and that made Memorial Day fall on the last Monday in May.

This way, we always get a three-day weekend, and that makes people happy.  Which is why there are so many family get-togethers and stuff like that.  Also a big auto race called the Indianapolis 500 is always held on the Sunday of Memorial Day weekend.  But here at our house, we don't really care about auto racing, so we didn't watch it.  And today, Mom is going to celebrate the holiday by planting some flowers (but not on anyone's grave) and by mowing the grass.  I told Mom we should have a cookout, with lots of yummy meat, but this turned out to be another feckless suggestion.