Source: US Global Legal Monitor
This Memorial Day, May 25, 2026, will be the 160th anniversary of the first official celebration of the holiday by a jurisdiction, when it was celebrated in Waterloo, New York, on May 19, 1866. Even before the official commemoration, Northerners and Southerners were remembering their Civil War dead by erecting statues and decorating graves with flowers and flags. After 2.5% of the population died in the Civil War (proportionate to 7 million people today), many people mourned a fallen soldier. On May 1, 1865, the African American community of Charleston, including 3,000 schoolchildren, 300 women from the Patriotic Association, and men from the Mutual Aid Society, held a procession to honor the 257 Union soldiers who lay in an unmarked grave in a former Confederate prison camp racecourse. The burial ground was remade as the Martyrs of the Racecourse Cemetery; a very large and well-organized ceremony took place, including laying flowers, singing “John Brown’s Body,” and strewing flowers and petals. (Blight, 69-70.)
Mary Logan, the wife of Civil War Commander General John A. Logan, wrote him about how touched she was by a similar one she witnessed in March 1868 in Petersburg, Virginia. On May 5, 1868, General John A. Logan, as Commander-in-Chief of the Grand Army of the Republic (GAR), issued General Order No. 11, designating May 30 “for the purpose of strewing with flowers or otherwise decorating the graves of comrades who died in defense of their country during the late rebellion.” The first federal celebration was held at Arlington National Cemetery on May 30, 1868, and
“… flowers, and wreaths were gathered from the general public, the botanical gardens, the President’s Conservatory, and the Treasury gardens. The floral tributes and attendees all crossed the Potomac River to Arlington via the Long Bridge. The ceremony was called to order at Arlington House by W.T. Collins, Esq., in the presence of General and Mrs. Grant. The mansion once owned by General Robert E. Lee was draped in mourning. The proclamation issued by General John Logan of the Grand Army of the Republic that established May 30 as the official holiday was read by the master of ceremonies.”
Early Memorial Day celebrations were known as Decoration Day, in reference to the banners, flowers, and grave ornamentation made on the day to honor the fallen. The name and the date of the holiday officially changed in 1968, when Congress passed the Uniform Monday Holiday Act (PL 90-363), and named Memorial Day on the last Monday in May. In 2000, Congress underlined the importance of the holiday by asking Americans to observe a minute of silence to remember those who gave their lives in service for us and our country in the National Moment of Remembrance Act, as P.L. 106-579.
Sources:
Blight, David. Race and reunion : the Civil War in American memory.
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