8 Surprising Facts About Memorial Day History

As the Civil War neared its end, thousands of Union soldiers held as prisoners of war were herded into a series of hastily assembled camps in Charleston, South Carolina. Conditions at one camp, a former racetrack near the city’s Citadel, were so bad that more than 250 prisoners died from disease or exposure. They were buried in a mass grave behind the track’s grandstand.

Three weeks after the Confederate surrender, an unusual procession entered the former camp: On May 1, 1865, more than 1,000 people recently freed from enslavement, accompanied by regiments of the U.S. Colored Troops (including the Massachusetts 54th Infantry) and a handful of white Charlestonians, gathered in the camp to consecrate a new, proper burial site for the Union dead. The group sang hymns, gave readings and distributed flowers around the cemetery, which they dedicated to the “Martyrs of the Race Course.”

Even before the war ended, women’s groups across much of the South were gathering informally to decorate the graves of Confederate dead. In April 1886, the Ladies Memorial Association of Columbus, Georgia, resolved to commemorate the fallen once a year—a decision that seems to have influenced Major General John Logan to follow suit, according to his own wife.

However, southern commemorations were rarely held on one standard day, with observations differing by state and spread out across much of the spring and early summer. It’s a tradition that continues today: Three southern states officially recognize a Confederate Memorial Day, all on different dates.

Americans embraced Logan’s notion of Memorial Day immediately. That first year, more than 27 states held some sort of ceremony, with more than 5,000 people in attendance at a ceremony at Arlington National Cemetery. By 1890, every former state of the Union had adopted it as an official holiday.

Observation spread across the country during the 20th century, but the holiday was still not official in the eyes of the U.S. government. Finally, in 1971, as America was deeply embroiled in the Vietnam War, Memorial Day became a federal holiday.

For more than 50 years, Memorial Day was used to commemorate only people killed in the Civil War, not in any other American conflict. As Logan encouraged in his “Memorial Day Order,” observers should specifically decorate “the graves of comrades who died in defense of their country during the late rebellion.” After America’s entry into World War I, however, the holiday was expanded to honor U.S. military personnel killed in all wars.

Logan didn’t specify what to call the May 1868 commemoration, so people dubbed it Decoration Day in a nod to his directive to place flowers and other decorations on fallen soldiers’ graves. The Decoration Day name stuck until the end of the 19th century when the holiday was increasingly known as Memorial Day. Both names were still in use until Congress settled the debate when it instituted the “Memorial Day” federal holiday.

The legislation that made Memorial Day into an official national holiday also changed its date. The Uniform Monday Holiday Act of 1968 moved Memorial Day from its traditional observance on May 30 (regardless of the day of the week) to the last Monday in May. The decision has sparked controversy.

Veterans groups, concerned that more Americans associate the holiday with first long weekend of the summer and not its intended meaning to honor the nation’s war dead, continue to lobby for a return to the May 30 observances. For more than 20 years, their cause was championed by Hawaiian Senator—and decorated World War II veteran—Daniel Inouye, who until his 2012 death reintroduced legislation in support of the change at the start of every Congressional term.

For almost as long as Memorial Day has existed, there’s been a rivalry about who celebrated it first. Boalsburg, Pennsylvania, bases its claim on an 1864 gathering of women to mourn those recently killed at Gettysburg. In Carbondale, Illinois, they’re certain that they were first, thanks to an 1866 parade led, in part, by John Logan. There are even two dueling Columbus challengers (one in Mississippi, the other in Georgia) who have battled it out for Memorial Day supremacy for decades.

Only one town, however, has received the official seal of approval from the U.S. government. In 1966, 100 years after the town of Waterloo, New York, shuttered its businesses and took to the streets for the first of many continuous, community-wide celebrations, President Lyndon Johnson signed legislation declaring the tiny upstate village the “official” birthplace of Memorial Day.

In the spring of 1915, bright red flowers began poking through the battle-ravaged land across northern France and Flanders (northern Belgium). Canadian Lieutenant Colonel John McCrae, who served as a brigade surgeon for an Allied artillery unit in World War I, spotted a cluster of the poppies shortly after administering to patients during the bloody Second Battle of Ypres. The sight of the bright red flowers against the dreary backdrop of war inspired McCrae to pen the poem, “In Flanders Field,” in which he gives voice to the soldiers who had been killed in battle and lay buried beneath the poppy-covered grounds.

Later that year, a Georgia teacher and volunteer war worker named Moina Michael read the poem in Ladies’ Home Journal and wrote her own poem, “We Shall Keep the Faith,” to begin a campaign to make the poppy a symbol of tribute to all who died in war. The poppy remains a symbol of remembrance to this day.

Despite the increasing celebration of the holiday as a summer rite of passage, there are some formal Memorial Day traditions still on the books. The American flag should be hung at half-staff until noon on Memorial Day then raised to the top of the staff. And since 2000, when Congress passed legislation, all Americans are encouraged to pause for a National Moment of Remembrance at 3 p.m. local time.

The federal government has also used the holiday to honor non-veterans: The Lincoln Memorial was dedicated on Memorial Day 1922.