Jun 05, 2025
2025 Memorial Day Observance features a History of Memorial day
We held our annual Memorial Day observance on Monday, 11 AM, May 26th in the cafeteria of the old
Theodore Teppo was Master of Ceremonies, opening the observance with the American Legion Post 134 Color Guard (Peter Arends and Chris Plyman), followed by Paul Ott of Transform offering an invocation prayer. Kate Bysheim, former soprano soloist at Northwest Chorale, Seattle Pro Musica and University Unitarian Church did a spectacular rendition of the National Anthem. This year’s topic, delivered by Chris Plyman, American Legion Historian, focused on the history of Memorial Day. The program closed with Diane Kennish sharing the poem “In Flander’s Fields”, followed by an open microphone, where audience shared moving personal memories.
A History of Memorial Day
While exceptional valor and sacrifice has occurred in all of America’s wars, we did not always honor our fallen with a day dedicated in their honor. In fact, the first Memorial Day was not called Memorial Day at all, but Decoration Day.
Decoration Day arose after the Civil War, when the graves of over a half million Union and Confederate soldiers dotted our landscape. It was a day in spring when the graves of local war dead would be decorated with the flowers that bloomed in spring. Some towns and cities conducted memorial observances during the war and thus claim to be the real home to the first Memorial Day, but today I will mention the two most acknowledged origin stories.
Less than a month after the Confederacy surrendered in 1865, a commemoration day was organized by a group of freed slaves in Charleston, South Carolina. This would make it make it the earliest post-Civil war Memorial Day observance on record.
In the late stages of the Civil War, the Confederate army transformed a horse racecourse in Charleston into a makeshift prison for Union captives. More than 260 Union soldiers died from disease and exposure while being held in the racecourse’s open-air infield. Their bodies were hastily buried in a mass grave behind the grandstands. When Charleston fell, one of the first things the freedmen and women did was to give the fallen Union prisoners a proper burial. They exhumed the mass grave and reinterred the bodies in a new cemetery with a tall, whitewashed fence with the inscription “Martyrs of the Racecourse.”
Then on May 1, 1865, a crowd of 10,000 people, mostly freed slaves and some white missionaries, staged a parade around the racetrack. Three thousand Black schoolchildren carried bouquets of flowers and sang “John Brown’s Body.” Members of the famed 54th Massachusetts and other Black Union regiments were in attendance and marched. Black ministers recited verses from the Bible.
Eventually the old horse track was torn down, and the Union soldiers’ graves were moved to a National Cemetery, and the story was forgotten for over 130 years until researchers found archival records of it in 1996.
Waterloo, New York remains the official birthplace of Memorial Day. Although it’s first observance occurred a year after Charleston, it became the first place to have it as an annual event.
The story of that Memorial Day begins in the summer of 1865, when a local druggist, Henry Welles, began to promote the notion of a special day to remember the fallen by placing flowers on their graves. Eventually he brought the idea to General John Murray, a civil war hero, who marshalled the other veterans’ support.
On May 5, 1866, the Village was decorated with flags at half-staff, draped with evergreens and mourning black. Veterans, civic societies and residents, led by General Murray, moved with a marching band to the three village cemeteries. There, ceremonies were held and soldiers’ graves decorated. One year later, on 5 May 1867, the ceremonies were repeated, becoming an annual observance.
On May 5, 1868, General John Logan, head of the largest Civil War Union veteran’s group, the Grand Army of the Republic, known as the GAR – I’ll mention them again later – issued a proclamation calling for “Decoration Day” to be observed annually and nationwide on May 30th. With his proclamation, Logan adopted a Memorial Day practice that had already begun in the Southern states two years earlier. The Northern states quickly adopted the holiday.
In 1868, memorial events were held in 183 cemeteries in 27 states. This year also marks the first national commemoration of Decoration Day, held at Arlington National Cemetary, where both Union and Confederate soldiers are buried. General James Garfield, who would later become president, addressed the crowd, and 5,000 participants decorated the graves of the 20,000 Civil War soldiers buried there.
In 1873, New York made Decoration Day an official state holiday and by 1890, every Northern state had followed suit. Before we became a state, the Washington Territorial Legislature established Decoration Day as a legal holiday beginning in 1888. In 1891, the new Washington State Legislature set May 30 as a legal state holiday, calling it both Memorial Day and Decoration Day.
There was no standard program for these ceremonies, but they were typically sponsored by the women’s auxiliary of the GAR. By the 1880s, ceremonies were becoming more consistent across the country as the GAR provided handbooks that presented specific procedures, poems, and Bible verses for local GAR post commanders to use in planning events.
By the 20th century, and especially after World War One, Decoration Day eventually extended to honor all Americans who fought and died while in the U.S. military service. Memorial Day speeches became an occasion for veterans, politicians, and ministers to commemorate the wars, allowing Americans to make sense of their history in terms of sacrifice for a better nation.
During WWI, Canadian Lieutenant Colonel John McCrae wrote a poem called Flanders Fields. Its opening lines refer to the fields of poppies that grew among the soldiers’ graves. Inspired by that poem, a woman named Moina Michael attended a YWCA conference wearing a silk poppy pinned to her coat and distributed over two dozen more to others present. The American Legion, created as an organization of World War One Veterans, adopted the poppy as its official symbol of remembrance in 1920. This is why you’ll find Legionnaires distributing poppies at various locations this weekend.
The name “Memorial Day” gradually became more common than “Decoration Day”, especially after World War II, but it was not declared the official name by federal law until 1967. In 1968, Congress moved four holidays, including Memorial Day, from their traditional dates to a Monday to create three-day weekends. In 1971 the change moved Memorial Day from its traditional May 30 date to the last Monday in May. Then, in 2000, Congress passed the National Moment of Remembrance Act, asking people to stop at three PM on Memorial Day for one minute to remember the fallen.
Lastly, for those of you who are planning a fun get together after this afternoon and are wondering how that fits in with remembering the fallen, I want you to know that people have been asking that question almost from the start. In 1869, The New York Times wrote that the holiday could become “sacrilegious” if it focused more on pomp, dinners and oratory.
Throughout the 19th century, solemn ceremonies were followed by picnics and foot races. This is a holiday that evolved right alongside baseball, barbecues and the Indie 500. So please know that these activities have also part of Memorial Day history. I think it’s appropriate than on Memorial Day, are flag is at half-staff only until noon, then rises again to full staff for the rest of the day.
Just don’t forget it is first and foremost a day of remembrance. We owe it to those that died, and the loved ones they left behind to make sure that their sacrifices are remembered and that their service to this nation always be honored.
May God bless
