Introduction: In this article, Melissa Davenport Berry continues her exploration of Memorial Day history with touching stories and photos. Melissa is a genealogist who has a website, americana-archives.com, and a Facebook group, New England Family Genealogy and History.

“Let us raise above them the dear old flag they saved from dishonor. Let us gather around their sacred remains and garland the passionless mounds above them with the choicest flowers of springtime.”

–The call for memoriam in 1866 by Gen. John A. Morgan, commander of the Grand Army of the Republic.

Today I continue with my two-part Memorial Day special inspired by a newspaper feature page I found in GenealogyBank’s Historical Newspaper Archives. (Note: “Decoration Day” officially became “Memorial Day” by an act of Congress in 1967, but by the late 19th century the two names were used interchangeably.)

On Memorial Day in 1954 the Detroit News featured Harvey Dunn’s drawing “The American Soldier” alongside the official list of Detroit-area soldiers killed in the Korean War, and a photograph of a widow and her son at the grave of a fallen serviceman who died in 1944 – a scene that symbolized Memorial Day across the nation.

I concluded Part 1 with a feature story by John C. Treen entitled “How Heartache Holiday Grew from Longing of Loved Ones,” tracing the origins of Memorial Day. Today I present more from Treen’s story.

Treen writes:

There are at least a dozen places, including Detroit, which claim to have held the first Memorial Day service in honor of the war dead.

Four Michigan women, the wife and two daughters of the late Rev. Frank W. May, of Vicksburg, and Mrs. Sarah Nicholas Evans, of Hudson, were credited with holding a memorial service for Union veterans in 1862.

Two veterans of the war, however, said they were sitting on a church porch near Carbondale, Ill., in 1866 when they saw a black-clad woman enter the cemetery [Woodlawn Cemetery] and place flowers on a comrade’s grave.

The postcard below represents such a scene of a grieving widow, mother, sister, or loved one.

A few weeks later, they said, all of Carbondale’s veterans marched to the cemetery, leading 15 flower girls.

Below is an image of a historical marker at Carbondale’s Woodlawn Cemetery, “Site of the First Memorial Service in Illinois.” You can read more about this marker courtesy of Historical Marker DataBase (HMDB).

This photo of a 1952 Memorial Day parade shows a float recognizing Carbondale’s claim as the site of the first Memorial Day in 1866.

Down in Jackson, Miss., you can see inscribed on the Confederate States Monument where “Decoration Day,” a term formerly used for Memorial Day, was originated there on April 26, 1865, by Mrs. Sue Landon Vaughan.

Hundreds gathered in response to Mrs. Vaughan’s plea in a newspaper, born of sorrow over Lee’s surrender, that flowers be carried to the city’s cemetery. It was said that every grave was heaped with the spring blooms of the South.

This photo card shows the Confederates States Monument in Jackson, Mississippi. The monument was dedicated on 3 June 1891, with a crowd of thousands in attendance. In the base of the monument is a statue of Jefferson Davis made from Italian marble. Among those present for the ceremony were Confederate generals John B. Gordon, Edmund Kirby Smith, and William L. Cabell.

Indeed, today, in many places in the South, “Decoration Day” still is observed on April 26, the day of bloom for many flowers.

And it should be noted that Decoration Day was observed all over the country, even in the Northern states.

Here is an illustration of Decoration Day in 1876 in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania.

Below is an image of Decoration Day observers at Blue Creek Cemetery in North Johns, Jefferson County, Alabama, in 1905.

Here is one from 1915, taken at Strawberry Point Cemetery in Cass Township, Clay County, Iowa.

This next photo was taken in 1930 by Gideon Thomas Laney on Decoration Day at a cemetery in Clay County, North Carolina.

The South itself does not agree on how it [Decoration Day] started, however. Columbus, Ga., claims that the first formal Memorial Day was carried out on April 26, 1866, by a group of women who formed an association there, and that four other states joined in the memorial.

Charleston, S. C., might lay claim to the first Memorial Day, which was observed there on the very day when President Lincoln’s bullet-pierced body lay in state in Chicago. However, this service honored only the Union dead.

It remained for Gen. John A. Logan, commander of the newly formed Grand Army of the Republic, to bring all the separate days of honor for the dead together. He issued an order in Washington on May 5, 1868.

He told all his 500,000 comrades of the GAR to observe the 30th day of May for the strewing of flowers or otherwise honoring the graves of “comrades who died in defense of their country.”

“Let no vandalism or avarice or neglect, no ravages of time, testify to the present or coming generations that we have forgotten as a people the cost of a free and undivided republic,” he ordered.

Below are more images of Memorial Day across America.

Here are African American G.A.R. veterans and Daughters of Union Soldiers parading on Memorial Day in New York City, 30 May 1912.

Here are two women planting flowers at a soldier’s grave in Arlington Cemetery, Arlington, Virginia, in 1943.

In this photo, from Memorial Day in 1950, Alice McEwen, left, and Ola Rollins of the Woman’s Relief Corps of the Grand Army of the Republic Auxiliary place flags on the graves of six Union soldiers in Oakwood Cemetery in Fort Worth, Texas.

Here are veterans saluting in Chelsea, Massachusetts, on Memorial Day in 1979.

Members of various veteran organizations and the Gold Star Mothers place wreaths on the monument to Civil War soldiers in Monument Square, Portland, Maine, on 25 May 1981.

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Note on the header image: the Tomb of the Unknown Soldier located in Arlington National Cemetery, Virginia. Credit: Raul654; Wikimedia Commons.

Related Article:

• Memorial Day Tributes (part 1)