Memorial Day activities planned for Monday
Monday, May 30, 2022, is Memorial Day in America.
The Falls County Historical Commission and American Legion Post 31 invite you to set aside this day to remember and honor the brave men and women who have served in our military and who made the supreme sacrifice. The annual remembrance will be held at 11 a.m. on Monday, May 30, at the Falls County Courthouse in the District Court Room on the third floor. Our special guest speaker will be Navy Captain Samuel Wright, Ret.
The history of Memorial Day began as “Decoration Day” following the end of the Civil War and became an official federal holiday in 1971. It is unclear exactly how this tradition originated but numerous communities throughout the country lay claim to being the first. One of the earliest Memorial Day commemorations is recorded as being organized by a group of formerly enslaved people in Charleston, S.C., less than a month after the Confederacy surrendered in 1865. They entered a former prisoner of war camp where Union soldiers had died in large numbers and buried in a mass grave. They reburied the bodies and marked the graves with flowers.
Another accounting is of the women of the South who began decorating and caring for the graves of the soldiers who fought for the Confederacy. But they also took note of the cemeteries where Union soldiers had been buried and decorated those graves also. They knew the families of the Union soldiers would want to know someone was caring for their loved ones. The arguments continued throughout the years as to who was the originator of this day, and in 1966, the federal government declared Waterloo, New York, the official birthplace of Memorial Day.
On May 5, 1868, General John A. Logan, leader of an organization for Northern Civil War veterans, called for a nationwide day of commemoration for the over 620,000 soldiers killed in the Civil War. His decree stated that Decoration Day “is designated for the purpose of strewing with flowers, or otherwise in decorating the graves of comrades who died in defense of their country during the late rebellion, and whose bodies now lie in almost every city, village and hamlet churchyard in the land.” This day was chosen for Decoration Day because it was not the anniversary of any particular battle.
On the first Decoration Day, General James Garfield made a speech at Arlington National Cemetery with 5,000 participants in attendance who decorated the graves of the 20,000 Civil War soldiers buried there. He spoke from the steps of the mansion that once had belonged to Robert E. Lee and is now part of the Arlington National Cemetery.
While Decoration Day was originally to honor those lost while fighting in the Civil War, following World War I the holiday evolved to commemorate American military personnel who died in all wars, including both World Wars, The Vietnam War, The Korean War and the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan and any that followed. In 1968, Congress passed the Uniform Monday Holiday Act, which established Memorial Day as the last Monday in May and created a three-day weekend for federal employees and made it a federal holiday for the nation. This went into effect in 1971.
The red poppy is often worn in remembrance of those fallen in war — a tradition that began with a World War I poem, written by a brigade surgeon who was struck by the sight of the red flowers growing on a ravaged battlefield. WWI, 1914-1918, took a greater human toll than any previous conflict, with some 8.5 million soldiers dead of battlefield injuries or disease, and ravaged the landscape of Western Europe. Lt. Colonel John McCrae, a Canadian serving in an Allied medical unit, spotted the red poppy growing on the war-torn battlefield and wrote the poem “In Flanders Field”. The red poppy became a symbol for remembering our soldiers who sacrificed their lives in defense of freedom and was quickly adopted by other countries.
The U.S. Congress passed the National Moment of Remembrance to ask all Americans to stop where they are on May 30, 2022 at 3pm to observe 60 seconds of silent reflection in memory of the men and women who have died while serving in our military. This is another way to give honor to our fallen heroes.
Please join your friends and neighbors at 11 a.m. on Monday, May 30, in giving honor to the memories of those who gave so much.