Memorial Day

Memorial Day was an outgrowth of our Civil War, in which some 620,000 Americans died and hundreds of thousands were maimed. The impact on communities both Union and Confederate gave birth to spontanous demonstrations of grief and respect.

In 1864, women from Boalsburg, Pennsylvania, put flowers on the graves of their dead from the recent fighting and slaughter at Gettysburg. The following year, a group of women decorated the graves of soldiers buried in Vicksburg, Mississippi.

In April 1866, women from Columbus, Mississippi, laid flowers on the graves of both Union and Confederate soldiers. It was recognized at the time as an act of healing regional wounds. In the same month, up in Carbondale, Illinois, 219 Civil War veterans marched through town in memory of the fallen to Woodlawn Cemetery, where Union hero Maj. Gen. John A. Logan delivered the principal address. The ceremony gave Carbondale its claim to the first organized, community-wide Memorial Day observance.

On May 5, 1866, Waterloo, New York, began holding a yearly memorial service .

Waterloo received congressional recognition as the "birthplace of Memorial Day.

May 30, 1868, was designated "for the purpose of strewing with flowers, or otherwise decorating the graves of comrades who died in defense of their country during the fighting.

Historic Old Saint Paul's Cemetery predates the first "Memorial Day" by more than sixty years, having been established in 1800. The cemetery is the final resting place for a number of military heroes.

Among them:

John Eager Howard: A captain, who rose to the rank of colonel in the Continental Army, he fought at the Battle of White Plains and in the Battle of Monmouth. He was awarded a silver medal by Congress for his leadership at the Battle of Cowpens, during which he commanded the 3rd Maryland Regiment, Continental Army.

General George Armistead: who served as the commander of Fort McHenry during the Battle of Baltimore in the War of 1812.

General Lewis A. Armistead: was mortally wounded while leading his brigade towards the center of the Union line in Pickett's Charge. Armistead led his brigade from the front, waving his hat from the tip of his saber, and reached the stone wall at the "Angle", which served as the charge's objective. The brigade got farther in the charge than any other, but it was quickly overwhelmed by a Union counterattack. Armistead was shot three times just after crossing the wall and died two days later.

I have informally counted more than a dozen other names of military who are listed in the cemetery records.

The photos were taken at Old Saint Paul's Cemetery during a ceremony.

Fine Print: The foregoing represents the author’s somewhat informal meanderings in topics that he is unqualified to report on. Any discovered factual errors should not be reported to the author and should be kept to oneself. Any accusations of plagiarism or the like will be disregarded totally by the writer and will not be contested nor apologized for. The same holds true for missspelllings, typos, and other nit-picky rubbish.