Tomorrow is Memorial Day.
Everywhere.
That’s not quite as unremarkable as it sounds. For this year, unlike so many others, little Waterloo, N.Y., will mark the holiday at the exact same time as all the rest of us patriotic, parade-loving, “point me to the nearest Memorial Day mattress sale” Americans.
“We always celebrate it on May 30, because that’s the original, official date,” said Jane Shaffer, co-chair of the annual Commemorate Celebrate Memorial Day event in the Finger Lakes village of 5,118 people. “We weren’t going to go along with the rest of the nation and round it up so it was just part of another three-day weekend.”
Why, you ask, should we even care what they do in Waterloo? Answer: Because it’s the official “Birthplace of Memorial Day.” Lyndon Johnson said so way back in 1966, when he issued a presidential proclamation giving the nod to the town that first laid flowers on soldiers’ graves on May 5, 1866.
This, despite the fact that Memorial Day is a direct outgrowth of the Civil War, which killed or injured 56 percent of the Confederacy’s soldiers (compared to a mere 41 percent of the Union’s troops).
Damn Yankees!
Georgia stakes a claim
“It started up North as a day set aside to put flowers on the graves of Civil War soldiers,” said Atlanta-based historian Alan Axelrod, whose many books include the just-released third edition of “The Complete Idiot’s Guide to the Civil War.” “My mother was born in 1912, and when I was growing up it was still referred to as ‘Decoration Day.’ ”
Indeed, tomorrow represents that rare perfect union (lowercase) of competing interests on a holiday that’s had plenty of them. The 140-plus year history of Memorial Day (its official name as of 1967) is littered with competing names, dates, even assertions of parentage.
Some 25 places claim to have been the birthplace of Memorial Day in 1866, according to the U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs, with Georgia’s own Macon and Columbus on the list.
“Many of them [were] in the South, where most of the war dead were buried,” the department writes in the “Memorial Day History” section of its website.
And that was two years before the head of the Grand Army of the Republic (translation: the organization of Union veterans) established Decoration Day and put it on the calendar for May 30. The first large observance was held in 1868 at Arlington National Cemetery, and Maj. Gen. John A. Logan urged the entire nation to follow suit by decorating the graves of the war dead with flowers.
The other Memorial Day
Atlanta clearly didn’t need any advice or encouragement when it came to honoring the nearly 7,000 Civil War dead buried in Oakland Cemetery. In 1866, the newly formed Atlanta Ladies Memorial Association held a Confederate memorial observance at Oakland. By 1875, when The Atlanta Constitution devoted a full page of coverage to the event, some 10,000 people reportedly packed the cemetery to “bend their heads in remembrance of men who had trod the path of honor.”
Ten thousand. Or, as we prefer to think of it, twice as many people as live in Waterloo, N.Y.
Complicating our case here a bit: “Memorial Day,” as formally established by the Georgia General Assembly in 1874, fell a whole month earlier, on April 26. That was the day in 1865 that Confederate Gen. Joseph E. Johnston’s surrender to Gen. William T. Sherman became official. It’s still recognized as Confederate Memorial Day here, and the Alfred Holt Colquitt chapter of the United Daughters of the Confederacy carries on with the Oakland Cemetery tradition by conducting an annual ceremony on the Saturday closest to April 26.
Oakland will be quiet tomorrow, but events honoring veterans will take place all across metro Atlanta. Among the biggest: the 63rd annual ceremony memorializing the more than 10,000 veterans of all America’s wars who are buried at Marietta National Cemetery.
Sixty-three years might not qualify for “Birthplace of Memorial Day” status. But that doesn’t mean it’s any less important, the folks in Waterloo say.
“We do not dispute that other communities have been doing it for a long time or just as caringly in their own ways,” Shaffer said. “We just say we love it all because it brings more attention to the real reason for Memorial Day.”
That’s so nice.
Especially for a Yankee.
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