The History of Memorial Day 05-25-2026

Memorial Day was originally known as Decoration Day in parts of the US. In this rebroadcast from 2023, Rachann talks about the history of Decoration Day when people began decorating graves with wreaths and flags after the Civil War, although the tradition didn't start in the United States, but in ancient Rome!

Transcript

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Today's podcast is brought to you by Mariah Bell Manor Channel, offering dog boarding, bathing, and daycare in an eco-friendly environment. Our pet care with a personal touch is not just a motto, it's really what we do. Our touch extends to the food without preservatives, quality and natural scanned foods, inclusive boarding, and a green living environment. Sounds like I might want to check in. Visit us anytime on our Facebook page, Mariah Bell Manor Kennel or Mariah Bellmanor Kennel.com. Enjoy your program. Welcome to Raising Connections, connecting your community to others through critters, companions, commerce, and agriculture. I'm Ray Shannon Mayer. Let's raise some connections. Here we go. This morning we have a topic that we've all just experienced. Memorial Day, Decoration Day. There's a pagan holiday. The Romans, the Scots, Irish, Germans, how did all of this get to the Roman Catholics and Christianity and civil holidays? What's this really all about? And how are the poppies linked with this? We have the answers for you. So how did this all get going? And is this unique to the United States? And the answer is absolutely not. It is not unique to the United States, and it really is more than white pants in the beginning of summer. But how did we get here? In one of our previous installments, we talked about special places, and many of you sent us emails at hello at raisingconnections.com talking about your special places, your connections, how this all worked. And one of the most common comments that we received was it really wasn't the place so much as it was the people you were with. Place didn't really matter. It's the people. What happens when you live away from those special people and how you handle that, especially at times of, let's face it, we've all been there, the weddings, the funerals, the major birthdays, right? The remembrance, the decoration day, this is how our roots came to fruition. And it's that question about what happens when you live away from those special people and those stories and that connection that we all bring together. Memorial Day is a holiday here in the United States, previously known as Decoration Day. And decoration day is what I grew up calling it. I lived in southern Indiana, and to me, decoration day was the day that everybody had an extra day off work, and you went to church in the morning and you had dinner at grandma's after celebrating by going out and cleaning off graves, making flowers for two weeks beforehand. The peonies, pineies, whatever you want to call them, were out blooming. And sometimes you took in fresh flowers, and sometimes you had maid flowers. A slight aversion here. I was really honored at one point that I was asked to make the wreath for my aunt because I especially felt close to her, and she'd recently passed with cancer when I was young, and I had been in 4-H, and 4-H plays a big role in my growing up, and I was doing floral decoration. Well, that year, my project was supposed to be grave decorations because that's a huge industry, and in agriculture, horticulture, and floriculture is a big deal. I was chosen to do this. I made multiple wreaths trying to get them commandeered the entire dining room table. This is how important decoration day was. But they hadn't served in the military. And when did that come about? And some of our folks who had passed away had served in the military, and there were always flags demarcating that, and they always got red, white, and blue on their graves, flowers, carnations mostly, because you could die those or mums. Mums were popular in the 80s and 90s. But where did antiquity did this come to us to be a memorial day for veterans who had sacrificed their lives? Let's talk about a term. Synchronism. Sociologist Robin Bueller introduces a similar term calling a civil religion, meaning it's not based in a religion, but that it is based in a civil relationship, something that we all do, and it's the religion of the culture, even though it's not a religion. Synchronism also refers to the amalgation of a culture and the beliefs and what happens and sort of those traditions, if you will. It's those connections that make us part of the fabric that causes our societal quilt to hold together. Where we're going is a place and time where it seems very similar to where we might be today. Our society is incredibly divided. Medicine is changing leaps and bounds. Technology is changing leaps and bounds. The way that we're making goods and products and transporting them and shipping them and moving all kinds of things is changing leaps and bounds. We're talking about 1860 to about 1880. That 20 years, we're coming off of a very divided civil war. We're talking about Jim Crow laws, we're talking about segregation beginnings, we're talking about some hardcore discrimination on the Irish and the German populations in New York at this time. They've come through with the potato famine 20 years before, and they're immigrants everywhere. And what does all this go into? And how do we pull this back together? One of the things I'd like for you to think about is the spread of decoration day. A lot of folks during this time, and decoration day is really an interesting way to put this. Like again, this is what I grew up calling it. Decoration day was a Scots-Irish tradition, if you will. But how in the heck did the Scots-Irish get there? In Christian culture, so synchronism, here we go. Christian cultures in the 19th century to the 1800s in southern Appalachia, along with Christian influences from the British Isles, and Africa all come together and they start this thing where you go out and you decorate graves. But did they start it? And we find out the answer is no, it's this amalgamation. We find this decoration day through West Virginia, Virginia, Kentucky, Tennessee, North Carolina, Northern South Carolina, Northern Georgia, northern central Alabama, northern Mississippi, and the Rocky Mountains of Utah. And then you find it again coming up the same way, the same decorations. The same day you get together, you go to church, you get the lunch, you maybe take it out to the gravesites, you're making special decorations. It's something really, really important, just like me being in 4-H and being a young person and being chosen to make the decorations that year. You also see a very similar trait through northern Louisiana, northeast Texas, Arkansas, eastern Oklahoma, and southern Missouri. When you start looking back through all of these immigration patterns, here's come some connections. Are you ready for this? When you start looking back at the people and who are coming through these areas, one of the things that you start seeing, and the dictionary of the Smoky Mountain English talks about this, and here's the quote from the Smoky Mountain English Dictionary: an occasion on which a family or church congregation gathers on a Sunday to place flowers on graves of a loved one and to hold a memorial service for them. Traditionally involved with this was singing, dinner on the ground or picnic, and a religious service. It's a time where you clean up the gravesites, get them ready for the opening of the summer, if you will. A potluck was always put together with this. A potluck is something I've learned as a colloquial term, a potluck, a pitch in, a dinner where everybody brings apart. The cemetery is seen as a whole integration after decoration day in the Appalachians. It's a compelling panoramic canvas of strikingly beautiful folk art where communities come together, and over time it's a breathtakingly beautiful place. Elizabeth Hooker was one of the folks in 1933 who talks about this and documents it. As you go through, we talk about what happens if you can't get back. This is a time of year where people are coming together. It's a very common time to have family reunions. The Memorial Day, the Labor Day in our modern culture has come to mean. This is what some place that you get together. Maybe it's not just sandals and white pants, but it's a time that you come together with your family, or you do a charitable donation, or it's the time that everybody bickers and fights because that's what you always did when so-and-so was there or not there, but you tell stories. Where did this tradition come from? So you see this Appalachia view, you see the connection coming from the South, northern south, if you will, going across. How the heck did it end up out west? Here's the connection. I went and took a trip to Oklahoma. And if you go back into our archives and listen to the Oklahoma trip program, what you'll hear is that area was settled because my relatives went there, was settled by a whole lot of people from southern Indiana, northern Kentucky that went to Oklahoma. And one of the comments I got from some of the folks who lived in Oklahoma was, Oh, you're from the East Coast. You won't understand here. It's flat, it's windy, it sure looks like where I grew up in the area of Indiana I grew up. And those folks have their roots in Irish Scots. And they moved across and migrated and took this tradition with them. So, how did that move into where we are today? So the Mitchell County Historical Society quotes that fresh flowers were used in early times, but then in the 1800s, crate paper flowers were used, and then on into artificial flowers. The floral wreaths were common in Appalachia, but also a token, a grave token. This was also something that was very common. And the Liberian folks who go back and just do a real quick history lesson here, Liberia was a free slave colony from the United States. So you might go ahead and we can have a whole conversation about that, but we should do it online at hello at raisingconnections.com. But what we really see here is these tokens at gravesides that represented that person's life or something in a way that that person had influenced them. And today the way we see that is the artwork that is put onto the gravestones. I know when my parents picked out their headstone, they were very, very specific on what they wanted future people to know about them. Almost a pyramid like. What things are you going to take with you? What do you want to tell folks who are going to be coming along behind you? And what do you want them to know about you? If you travel to a lot of the more recent cemeteries, you will see a lot of artwork on the items there. So we've talked about how these families come together, how we move this tradition across the United States, how it came to be. But is it just the Scots-Irish coming across? And is it just the cemetery Sundays and the flowering Sundays? And how these cemeteries all came together? Well, Peter Roberts characterizes a lot of these practices in a book and quotes many parts, especially in South Wales and Ireland, make friends of the deceased and make laudable plans to visit them. But is it just the Scots-Irish that are doing this? And the answer is way no. There are many other cultures that celebrate a very similar thing, and May seems to be the time to do it. It coincides with some pagan stuff that's going on. And a lot of things that you're going to be seeing in history, there's a date. It's an important date. We don't know exactly why it's a date, but we're going to do it on that date. And this is what Memorial Day becomes. So Ferella is the ancient Roman public festival celebrating mains, the Roman spirits of the dead, particularly souls of the deceased individuals. Ovid records the first memorial day being held on a modern calendar, February 21st, in the book The Fastidia. What he records is the Roman citizens bringing offerings to the tombs of their ancestors, arranging wreaths, sprinkling with grain, salt, and bread soaked in wine and scattering violets. Boy, that seems kind of familiar. We can see the tradition moving forward. The day of the dead in the Spanish culture is a Mexican holiday celebrated through Mexico and central and southern regions of Mexico. It's where people are looking into their heritage and they're putting the context of death as part of the human cycle. And it's not a day of sadness, but a day of celebration of their loved ones. Radanista is a Russian. I hope I pronounced that right. Couple different spellings, a couple different pronunciations based on the Russian Orthodox Church, and it commemorates the departed, and it's observed on the second Tuesday of Pasha or Easter. It's right along these same lines, and it was quite interesting that Easter was the time when we would go out in the Christian culture and celebrate cleaning of the graves and the risen peace. It then moved forward when the Slavs got involved and the Slavic word rusto came along and being joy, and it became more associated with the ascension versus the death. Something to think about. Bonfest, a Japanese Buddhist custom of honoring the spirits of one's ancestors, and it's very prominent in the Buddhist Confucian practice. Keeping the same thing going, you see it in the Chinese culture, and I hope I'm going to pronounce this right Kung Min Festival and the Qingming Festival, known as the Tomb Sweeping Day. In English, it's often called the Chinese Memorial Day or Ancestors Day. And it's a traditional Chinese festival observed throughout China, Singapore, Malaysia, Indonesia, Thailand, is the first day of the fifth solar term of the traditional lunar solar calendar. That makes it the 15th day after the spring equinox. And that means we're right in the same time period that everybody else is doing this. It's quite interesting to see how all these cultures, and we go back to the gentleman who said, this is a really a social culture. This is a social thread that links us all together. This morning we're putting some connections together between Memorial Day, decoration day, immigration patterns, family traditions, reunions, and the start of summer. Let's keep going on this because it gets really interesting. I think it gets really interesting. We just finished up talking about how the spread of decoration day connects with a religious peace, which connects with a cultural piece, which then connects with pieces that we've been celebrating in multiple cultures over time, and we see the spread of this decoration day going forward. Then we talked briefly about the Civil War. The Civil War is a big time point for this practice. Our population as a country has reached a point where we have a lot of divides and we have enough people doing enough things and moving around to enough different places that Texas looks a whole lot different than Boston, which looks a lot different than the Carolinas compared to Indiana at this time. You gotta think, Indiana became a state in 1820. And when as a kid I was reading history, everybody here in Maryland was already at with the Ark and the Dove, and they had been through the revolution, and we were in the wilderness. You've got now a time where the Civil War has happened, it's been divided. Abraham Lincoln is thought to have been credited with the starts of a memorializing tradition for decoration day with a Gettysburg address. To a lot of the folks who were there, it was a very momentous occasion. We have divides, 1845 to 1880s, big time for cultural change and cultural upheaval and divides, and we were just killing each other's families. The Civil War was a really hard time. Doesn't matter what color, what race, what anything, it was a hard time. Economically, socially, the whole nine yards. Folks were desperate to find something that unified and could bring everybody back together. Something that everyone could identify with. And Decoration Day was one of the things. It spreads across the United States. It we've got 60,000 to 80,000 dead Civil War soldiers. In this time period, we're still bringing folks out of mass graves, sending them to different places. Just a heads up on this one. If you haven't been to Frederick Medical History Museum, it's a really interesting place to go. Embalming actually came about during this time period of the Civil War. Go see the museum. But you've got all these different medicines coming in, all these different technologies coming in. And it's a scary time. You've got to think at this point, it's miasma theory. If you breathe it, you're going to catch it, right? Germ theory is not a thing. If it smells bad, it's really bad. We're in a time where we have the north very different from the south. We have a time where Jim Crow laws are starting. We have a time that social clubs are becoming very active. We need something we can all identify with. And this is why Decoration Day, the declaration of Declaration Day, and who claims to have done it first, is such a mystery and something to fight over that is a fabric cloth of our society, not something that is political. So this is why you're going to find a whole lot of people celebrating very similarly because they have similar backgrounds and similar places they've been in their lives. And it's the connection, it's that civil religion, if you will, that brings everybody together, that amalgamation of who we are as a culture. Not good, not bad, just who we are. This is when you're going to find folks throwing stuff out. So I'm going to put a few things out here just because. So in 1996, David Blight was going through doing some research for a book, Race and Reunion. Highly recommend it. But what he ran across was that in 1865, at the Washington racetrack course, and it's interesting that they call it a Washington race course, not racetrack course. There's a history and a reason for that one. We'll have to talk about that when Belmont comes up. But what they're finding is that this Charleston, South Carolina area, we talked about the mass graves, at the racetrack, there were thousands of buried bodies. They're being exhumed, they're being put in different places, they're being moved to different cemeteries, family members are being notified. And the blacks of the community, the African Americans of the community, are walking through and they have a parade and they're celebrating, much like you would for a decoration day, a memorial day. It's a remembrance, it's a memorial. And in this book, he talks, David Blight talks about this. And I would highly recommend another book, Ladies of the Club. It's written by Helen Hooven Santmeyer in the 1920s. It's a big thick book. It is an armchair read. It talks about what it was like to live day to day in this time, and it talks about the culture, the politics, the decoration days, the speeches, what's going to happen, who can do what. Is there a difference between the Presbyterian and the Methodist? And oh my goodness, what is it? And then you have the Catholics. A really interesting way to understand what the daily life in Ohio was at that point in a small town. It echoes the rest of our fabric. Waterloo, New York, celebrated on May 5th, 1866. And this was decided that that was going to be the place that we are going to say, as a nation, that's where Memorial Day, Decoration Day came from. The Veterans Administration accredits Ann Williams in New York in 1873. By 1890, all of the states were celebrating Decoration Day. And there's lots of stories about who did what, who was doing it when, who was the first. Newspaper articles can be found. And it really is this celebration that culturally is important across cultures, across religions. General Logan in 1868 says, let's do a remembrance day on the 30th of May, again, 1868. Time moves a little bit forward. President Garfield says, yes, we are going to have the Monday. We will have this be Memorial Day, and this is an important thing. Then we get involved in World War I and World War II. And ironically, Indiana plays an interesting role in this. Decoration Day versus Memorial Day, GAR, that organization that is for veterans, by veterans that came out of the Civil War, and they're fighting for medical care. They're actually fighting for, believe it or not, the Irish and the Germans, we talked about this in the first part, who had been immigrants to this country, had fought in the war, and they were talking about blood rights. They had given up their blood for their country. Therefore, are they not entitled to these benefits even though they are immigrants? What about this discrimination? They talk about the African Americans, the former slaves, the men of color who were there and they were fighting. Is this not a blood right? Considering the population and the politics of the time, kind of forward. But then they run into something big in 1911. Automobiles have been invented, and we're going to race them at the Indianapolis Motor Sports Way on Memorial Day, on decoration day. And boy, this gets the whole country up at arms talking about are we going to have something fun and not remembrance? Where we're going to go out and race our cars and show our technology? And oh my heavens! And in 1915, we got involved with another skirmish and the poppies flowers. A lot of times you'll see poppies around Veterans Day or celebrating veterans. This is based on a poem, The Poppies in the Flanders Field, The Poppies Blooming Amongst the Dead in World War I. By World War II, Decoration Day had changed to Memorial Day. After World War II, the population of Civil War soldiers had been aging, and it was more appropriate that our nation's fabric felt that we should remember the World War I and World War II veterans that were coming along. By May of 1966, LBJ formally announced that Waterloo, New York was the official home of the holiday. And by 1968, our Congress said it is the Uniformed Monday Holiday Act. And it was effective in 1971. Ironically, one of the changes in this holiday and the name from a war holiday to a uniformed holiday did with the fact that Vietnam War was actually a conflict and not a war. We move forward in time, and in May of 2000, the effective results of the Afghanistan conflicts, the Afghanistan wars, bring us to the effective moment of remembrance. At 3 p.m. on Memorial Day, it is a silence and a moment of remembrance. The fabric of our culture, that civil tradition, that civil reunion, that civil peace of us across all of our cultures, all of our nationalities, all says we need to stop, remember, and think of ourselves as part of a community. This program is a production of Raising Connections Media Company, hosted and produced by Rich Ann Mayer and edited and mixed by Robin Temple.