Memorial Day Began as Decoration Day

By: Allan Wallace 

The only thing consistent in the many “histories” of Memorial Day is that there is no consistency. MANY towns, some states like NY, and even the US Army CLAIM to have been the first to celebrate Memorial Day. Alternative histories abound.

The only problem is that they are all wrong. They already celebrated it widely in the south as an unofficial family holiday to commemorate and honor all our fore-bearers. It started decades before the so-called “Civil War”, and it was called Decoration Day. Everyone else who claims to have started the tradition took the idea of placing many flowers on the graves of forbearers and focused it only on the war dead.

In the early 1800, it was the tradition in many families to gather, perhaps in conjunction with a family reunion near the end of May. They would decorate the graves of ALL their fore-bearers, stand or sit around the graves, and share memories and stories of them.

Near the end of the War Between the States, people in several places started using the unofficial holiday specifically to honor those who fell in battle. Even though the war was not yet over, people in several places took their cue from practices already in existence and started decorating the graves of the war dead.

In 1874, Georgia was the first state to declare Memorial Day as an official holiday. By 1916, nine other southern states had done so, but most chose June 3rd in memory of CSS President Jefferson Davis’s birthday. As the tradition spread in the north, they used other days from late April through early June. Some northern states chose May 10th to celebrate Jefferson Davis’s capture by northern troupes. But the most common day of choice in both north and south was May 30th.

Memorial Day commemorating fallen soldiers of all wars was not an official NATIONAL holiday until 1966. And they changed it to the last Monday in May in 1971.

As late as the 1960s, families in the south were still calling it Decoration Day and celebrating it in the pre-war-between-the-states way. Some of my own earliest memories are of my mother’s family gathering on Decoration Day family reunions that seemed to happen almost every year.

My mother took photograph used, circa. 1966 at a church graveyard in Claiborne County, Tennessee. Pictured is my grandfather, Barton Redmon (upper left) with his brother and their sisters. They are standing and sitting around the graves and headstone of their parents. They were reconnecting and waiting for their Children and grandchildren to bring the decorations. This was the last time my grandfather and his siblings would all be together, at least until they all joined their parents in Heaven.