JACKSON, Miss. (WJTV) – There is probably no story with more asterisks attached than the story concerning the origin of Memorial Day. The version I favor is about Friendship Ceremony in Columbus, Mississippi, where the holiday grew from the first Decoration Day.
The Decoration Day was held a year to the day after Robert E. Lee surrendered his troops to U.S. Grant at Appomattox Courthouse in Virginia, effectively ending the Civil War. On that anniversary day, the ladies of Columbus came to Friendship Cemetery where the graves of Confederate and Union soldiers were decorated with flowers.
There are a lot of footnotes to that Decoration Day’s event because so many other places claim to have done the same thing on the first anniversary of the war. Most of them claim it was from their Decoration Day that the Memorial Day holiday evolved.
Cecile Wardlaw with the Greenwood Cemetery Association called me after I ran a story one year about the burial ground in downtown Jackson to tell me I had made a grave error. She said it’s documented that the first Decoration Day after the Civil War was held a year earlier, just afterward of Lee’s surrender reached Jackson, in our Greenwood Cemetery.
After the surrender, Lincoln’s assassination and the surrender of smaller armies of Confederates, a group of folks gathered at The Oaks, the former mayor Boyd’s home on Jefferson Street. Sue Langdon Adams was reading a copy of Plutarch’s “Lives’ and got to the part where the graves of fallen soldiers had been strewn with flowers.
The very next day, Sue, other folks and a band playing the Funeral Dirge from Handel’s “Saul” decorated the graves of the Confederate and Union dead in Greenwood Cemetery. The Confederate graves are still there. The Union troops were moved to National Cemeteries during the occupation of the South after the war.
Was that the Decoration Day that Memorial Day emerged from? Probably not. But we could add our footnote to the list of claimants and say it was.
