The first Civil War soldier's grave ever to be decorated, according to a Richmond Times-Dispatch article in 1906, for the first soldier killed in action during the Civil War. Some other contenders include the following: In 1966, 100 years after the town of Waterloo, New York, first shuttered its businesses and took to the streets for the first of many continuous, community-wide celebrations, President Johnson signed Congressional legislation declaring that tiny upstate village the “official” birthplace of Memorial Day One has even received federal recognition. All told, more than 20 towns claim to be the holiday’s birthplace. The gatherers sang hymns, gave readings and distributed flowers around the cemetery, which they dedicated to the "Martyrs of the Race Course."įor almost as long as there’s been an observance, there’s been a rivalry over who celebrated it first. Conditions at one camp were such that more than 250 prisoners died from disease or exposure and had been buried in a mass grave behind the track’s grandstand.
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Near the war's end, thousands of Union soldiers held as prisoners of war had been herded into a series of hastily assembled camps on the site of a former racetrack in Charleston.
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Colored Troops (including the Massachusetts 54th Infantry) and a group of white Charlestonians, gathered at a former war prisoner detention camp in Charleston, SC to consecrate a burial site for Union dead. Three weeks after the Confederate surrender, on May 1, 1865, more than 1,000 people recently freed from enslavement, accompanied by regiments of the U.S. Disturbed at the sight of the bare graves, the women placed flowers on their mounds as well.
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Nearby were the graves of Union soldiers, neglected because they were the enemy.
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In Columbus, MS., April 25, 1866, it has been recorded that a group of women visited a cemetery to decorate the graves of Confederate soldiers who had fallen in battle at Shiloh. (All of the previous wars and conflicts fought by the United States combined barely add up to the body count the country suffered in the Civil War.)Ī few local springtime tributes to Civil War dead began even before hostilities had ceased. In the years following the end of the Civil War increasing numbers of American communities began ritually tending to the remains and graves of an unprecedented number of fallen soldiers. Arlington National Cemetery, Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons