Memorial Day

A trio of women decorated the graves of fallen soldiers at Boalsburg, Pennsylvania, in October 1864, one of the earliest accounts the VA records.

In Columbus, Georgia, the Ladies Memorial Association's secretary Mary Ann Williams had her letter published in the local newspaper on 11 March 1866, asking for a day to wreathe the graves of the martyred dead with flowers. The association chose 26 April. Columbus, Mississippi held its own ceremony a day earlier and claims primacy still.

The historian David W. Blight, whose Race and Reunion sits in the VA's bibliography, writes that several American towns, north and south, later claimed the birthplace. All of them commemorate cemetery decoration events from 1866.

A century on, Congress passed a resolution recognizing Waterloo, New York, and President Johnson proclaimed the centennial. The VA reports that the federal government thereby declared the location the "birthplace" of Memorial Day, quotation marks included.

Waterloo appears nowhere in that page's account of the early observances, which names Boalsburg, Charleston and both towns called Columbus instead. Its defenders now rest their case partly on the longest unbroken run of observances rather than on being first.