Memorial Day

Every Memorial Day, we gather as a nation to mourn our collective fallen servicemen and servicewomen. It is actually written into the United States Code, or the Federal Code of Regulations, that the president issue a proclamation each year "calling on the people of the United States to observe Memorial Day by praying, according to their individual religious faith, for permanent peace". Some interesting facts about Memorial Day, which has been observed since the close of the American Civil War, can be found below.

• The name of the Memorial Day holiday was Decoration Day at first. Many states continued to use this name until the federal government officially adopted the name Memorial Day in 1967.
   
• Martha “Matt” Morton, a native of Georgia who moved to Mississippi in 1838 at the age of ten, is said to have helped organize the first Decoration Day in Columbus, Mississippi. In 1866, the year after the Civil War ended, she and a group of friends adorned the grave of every single soldier, Union and Confederate, in Friendship Cemetery, with bouquets of flowers.
  
  
• Morton and her friends were immortalized in an article of the New York Tribune. Francis Miles Finch, a poet and judge from New York, was inspired by their deed to write the poem “The Blue and The Gray” to honor the Civil War dead. The last stanza is here:
  

No more shall the war cry sever,
  Or the winding rivers be red;
The banish our anger forever
  When they laurel the graves of our dead!
      Under the sod and the dew,
        Waiting the judgment-day,
      Love and tears for the Blue,
        Tears and love for the Gray.

• The idea of Decoration Day wasn't always about just soldiers who were killed in action. John Lee Hooker, born in Tutwiler, MS, in 1917, sang Sonny Boy Williamson's 1938 song "Decoration Day" on his 1966 album It Serve You Right To Suffer. The song mourns the loss of a beloved woman and a promise to visit her grave with flowers.
  
  
• A national Decoration Day was held in 1868 at Arlington National Cemetery in Virginia by an organization of Union Army veterans. While this event was held on May 30, many states held their own Decoration Days in the spring and summer.
  
  
• Flowers have adorned the graves of the dead for millennia; Stone Age graves discovered in Israel were thought to be lined with blooms.
  
  
• After World War I ended in 1919, the day was officially expanded to honor all American war dead.
  
  
• Through 1971's Uniform Monday Holiday Act, it became official that Memorial Day would be celebrated on the last Monday of every May. 

Please have a safe holiday as we remember those who sacrificed everything for our freedom. 

Elisabeth Scott

Reference Librarian