Since 1971, Americans have observed Memorial Day as a legal federal holiday occurring on the last Monday of May. Commonly known as the unofficial start of summer, it is part of a three-day weekend filled with cookouts, travel and concerts and, most important, ceremonies honoring the nation’s war dead.

Before it was Memorial Day, it was known as “Decoration Day,” a tradition that began in the aftermath of the Civil War as cities and towns in both the North and South set aside days to decorate the graves of the fallen. And it had nothing to do with summer celebrations and retail sales. It was simply a time of healing as Americans sought to honor those who died in the nation’s deadliest war.

The first nationally proclaimed “Decoration Day” took place on May 30, 1868, at Arlington National Cemetery, the nation’s most sacred burial site for veterans. However, the origin of the holiday itself has become unclear over time with more than 25 cities and towns laying claim as its birthplace.

    Women prepare for Decoration Day in 1899. (Library of Congress)
  

THE BLUE AND THE GRAY

The practice of decorating graves with flowers dates to ancient times, and following the Civil War with its devastating casualties, citizens across the country had begun decorating the graves of the war dead.

According to “The Genesis of the Memorial Day Holiday in America” by Daniel Bellware and Richard Gardiner, the first request for a decoration day holiday came from Mary Ann Williams, secretary of the Ladies Memorial Association of Columbus, Ga. Williams wrote a March 10, 1866, letter to the Columbus Daily Sun that called for establishing “at least one day in each year to embellishing their humble graves with flowers.” The letter soon appeared in newspapers across Georgia and throughout the South leading to establishment of April 26, 1866, as “Decoration Day.” However, a Memphis newspaper erroneously reported the date to be April 25, which prompted a group of women in Columbus, Miss., to go ahead with their decorating a day earlier, thereby staking their claim as to being first. They also decorated the graves of both Confederate as well as Union soldiers who died fighting on Southern battlefields. This inspired poet Frances Miles Finch to write the poem “The Blue and the Gray,” which included this stanza:

“From the silence of sorrowful hours

The desolate mourners go,

Lovingly laden with flowers

Alike for the friend and the foe:

Under the sod and the dew,

Waiting on the judgment day,

Under the roses, the Blue,

Under the lilies, the Gray.”

The poem’s popularity helped spread the word of the event to cities in the North, Bellware and Gardiner wrote. Inspired by people in the South, Maj. John A. Logan, the head of the Grand Army of the Republic, an organization of Union Army veterans, decided a national decoration day should be established. On May 5, 1868, the GAR issued General Orders No. 11 or the “Memorial Day Act,” officially establishing “Memorial Day” as the date to remember the war dead and decorate their graves with flowers, according to the National Cemetery Administration of the U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs. The department said he chose that date because it was a time when flowers would be in bloom across the country.

In the order, Logan wrote that the nation should never forget the costs of the war. “We should guard their graves with sacred vigilance. … Let pleasant paths invite the coming and going of reverent visitors and fond mourners. Let no neglect, no ravages of times, testify to the present or to the coming generations that we have forgotten as a people the cost of a free and undivided republic.”

    A Memorial Day ceremony at the Tomb of Unknown Soldier at Arlington National Cemetery. (Library of Congress)
  

In 1873, New York became the first state to officially recognize the holiday and by 1890 all of the previously known Union states also adopted it. After World War I, the event was expanded to include the fallen Americans of all wars. Still, there was no official federal holiday approved by Congress. In 1950, through congressional joint resolution, lawmakers requested that the president issue a proclamation “calling upon the people of the United States to observe each Memorial Day as a day of prayer for permanent peace and designating a period during each such day when the people of the United States might unite in such supplication.”

Another congressional resolution in 1966, which was proclaimed by President Lyndon B. Johnson, officially recognized Waterloo, N.Y., as the birthplace of Memorial Day. (Waterloo, led by Henry C. Welles, a local druggist, spearheaded a decoration/memorial day that took place on May 5, 1866.) Two years later, the Uniform Monday Holiday Act was passed to become effective in 1971 and designated Memorial Day a national holiday. The act also moved it from May 30 to the last Monday in May, creating a three-day weekend for American workers.

In 2000, the National Moment of Remembrance Act became law. It created the White House Commission on the National Moment of Remembrance, which promotes Memorial Day commemorations. It also encourages all Americans to pause wherever they are at 3 p.m. local time on Memorial Day for a moment of silence to remember and honor those who died in military service.

“It’s a way we can all help put the ‘memorial’ back in Memorial Day,” said Carmella LaSpada, the first executive director of the commission.

In a Washington Post article, LaSpada said she was inspired, in part, to raise awareness about Memorial Day’s true meaning when she met a group of schoolchildren in Lafayette Park in Washington and asked them what Memorial Day meant.

The article says the children responded, “That’s the day when the swimming pool opens.” She responded: “True, but remember that we can go to the pool or a baseball game because brave Americans died for our freedom.”

    Wanda Malone (left), Linda Townsend (top left) and Paulette Yarbrough (right) all of Heber Springs plant flags in front of headstones in preparation for Memorial Day on Wednesday, May 26, 2021, at the Arkansas State Veterans Cemetery at North Little Rock. More photos at www.arkansasonline.com/527flags/ (Arkansas Democrat-Gazette/Thomas Metthe)
  

AUSTIN, Texas – Powerful storms killed at least seven people and left a wide trail of destruction Sunday across Texas, Oklahoma and Arkansas after obliterating homes and destroying a truck stop where drivers took shelter during the latest deadly weather to strike the central U.S.

Five of the deaths were in Texas, near the Oklahoma border, where a tornado Saturday night plowed through a rural area near a mobile home park, officials said. Storms also caused damage in Oklahoma, where guests at an outdoor wedding were injured. Tens of thousands of residents were without power across the region.

“It’s just a trail of debris left. The devastation is pretty severe,” Cooke County Sheriff Ray Sappington told The Associated Press.

Officials said multiple people were transported to hospitals by ambulance and helicopter in the Texas county of Denton, but they did not immediately know the full extent of the injuries. Sappington said the dead in Texas included three family members who were found in one home near the small community of Valley View.

At least one person was killed in Arkansas in Benton County, according to Melody Kwok, a county communications director. She said multiple other people were injured and that emergency workers were still responding to calls.

“We are still on search and rescue right now,” she said. “This is a very active situation.”

The destruction continued a grim month of deadly severe weather in the nation’s midsection.

Tornadoes in Iowa this week left at least five people dead and dozens injured. The deadly twisters have spawned during a historically bad season for tornadoes, at a time when climate change contributes to the severity of storms around the world. April had the second-highest number of tornadoes on record in the country.

In Texas, a tornado crossed into Denton County, north of Dallas, overturning tractor-trailers and halting traffic on Interstate 35, county spokesperson Dawn Cobb said. A shelter was opened in the rural town of Sanger.

Sappington said at least 60 to 80 people were inside a highway truck stop, some of them seeking shelter, when the storm barreled through, but there were no serious injuries.

Daybreak began to reveal the full scope of the devastation. Aerial footage showed dozens of damaged homes, including many without roofs and others reduced to rubble.

Residents woke up to overturned cars and collapsed garages. Some residents could be seen pacing around and sorting through scraps of wood, assessing the damage. Nearby, neighbors sat on the foundation of a wrecked home.

At the height of the storms, more than 24,000 homes and businesses lost power in Oklahoma, according to the state Office of Emergency Management. The agency also reported extensive damage from baseball-sized hail and multiple injuries at an outdoor wedding that was being held in rural Woods County.

Meteorologists and authorities issued urgent warnings to seek cover as the storms marched across the region overnight. “If you are in the path of this storm take cover now!” the National Weather Service office in Norman posted on X, formerly known as Twitter.

In Texas, the Denton Fire Department posted on social media that emergency crews near Dallas were responding to a marina “for multiple victims, some reported trapped.” Inaccessible roads and downed power lines in Oklahoma also led officials in the town of Claremore, near Tulsa, to announce on social media that the city was “shut down” due to the damage.

April and May have been a busy month for tornadoes, especially in the Midwest. Iowa was hit hard last week, when a deadly twister devastated Greenfield. Other storms brought flooding and wind damage elsewhere in the state.

The system causing the latest severe weather was expected to move east over the rest of the Memorial Day weekend, bringing rain that could delay the Indianapolis 500 auto race Sunday in Indiana and more severe storms in Illinois, Indiana, Missouri and Kentucky.

The risk of severe weather moves into North Carolina and Virginia on Monday, forecasters said.

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Tareen reported from Chicago, and McCormack reported from Concord, N.H.