Not Everyone Goes to the Lake

VFW Honor Guard enters Macksville Cemetery

Many Americans look forward to the 3-day weekend at the end of May as a time to celebrate the beginning of summer, but the historic roots of the holiday are quite different.  Ancient customs of honoring soldiers and decorating their graves exist in many cultures.  "Jubilee Day" was held on Monday, May 16, 1783, in Connecticut to commerate the end of fighting in the American Revolution.  After the Civil War, the federal government began creating national military cemeteries in 1865 for the War dead, and specific observations in both the South and the North occurred during the years after the Civil War, observing the custom of cleaning and decorating cemeteries.  This custom became known as "Decoration Day," but by the 1880s the name had gradually begun to change to "Memorial Day."  Many communities, like my own childhood hometown, continued the use of the original term.  (See Memorial Day at Farmington Cemetery, 5-10-2012 and Guest Post by Misty Beck, 5/24/2012 in blog archives.)

Jubilee Celebration in St. John, KS Park

Because many communities observed some sort of ceremony or tradition, the origin of the first Decoration Day is uncertain.  However, a ceremony organized by teachers, missionaries, and Black residents of Charleston, SC, for the purpose of cleaning up and landscaping the burial field there in 1865 is often identified as the 1st Decoration Day.

Food is an important part of the Jubilee Celebration.

It was not until after W.W. II in 1967 that the name was official changed to "Memorial Day."  Ironically, it was one year later, on June 28, 1968, that Congress moved Memorial Day from the traditional May 30th to the last Monday in May, creating a 3-day weekend, a change that many see as diminishing the observance of the original purpose for the day.  Many Americans now take advantage of the 3-day weekend as an opportunity to travel to a holiday destination like the beach, a lake, or a mountain cabin, overlooking the significance of observing Memorial Day.

The  dusty/muddy town square of Isaac's time is now a park.

At the time Congress created the 3-day weekend, several states declined to adopt the changed date for Memorial Day, continuing to observe it on May 30th, but gradually all fifty states complied.  Seeing the shift away from Memorial Day observances, Senator Daniel Inouye, a W. W. II veteran, initiated an effort to return to the traditional observance, an effort he continued until his death in 2012, but the recreational holiday seems firmly established for too many people for the return to a day of remembrance and honoring those who gave their lives for their country to return as the universal practice.

Jubilee Celebration 2014

The traditional observations are not entirely forgotten, however.  Many cemeteries in the region where Isaac Werner claimed his homestead continue to conduct Memorial ceremonies, such as the ceremony performed by the local VFW in Macksville pictured in this blog illustrates.  One member of the honor guard is a 90-year-old W.W. II veteran, and the veteran who recites the traditional memorial pledge is 93.  The trumpeter who plays "taps" for the ceremony is a 2014 high school graduate and young children continue to offer poppies to those who enter the cemetery gates.

The fountain is popular with young & old.

Several communities continue patriotic parades and celebrations in the city parks, including the Jubilee Celebration in the St. John Park near the Stafford County Courthouse, the same county seat that Isaac Werner visited more than a century ago.

Many parade participants displayed flags.

Isaac's regard for Union veterans was complicated.  His hometown in Pennsylvania provided soldiers for the Union Army during the Civil War, but there was also a strong contingency of Southern sympathizers and draft dodgers in his community.  (See How Far is Gettysburg, 5/24/2012 in the blog archives.)  Because Union veterans tended to remain loyal to Lincoln's Republican Party, in opposition to the People's Party that Isaac supported, he resented their political alliance and called them "moss-back Republicans."  However, Union veterans were also among his best friends, whom he respected.  Isaac never mentioned the observance of Memorial Day in his journal, but the old traditions continue to be observed in his community to this day.  (See  St. John Park, 6/20/2013, in the blog archives for the story and images of the old St. John town square and the creation of the park.)

Memorial Day at Farmington Cemetery

When I was a child, Memorial Day was an occasion for honoring America's fallen soldiers and visiting graves of ancestors.  Tin cans and canning jars were covered with tin foil, around which a bow was tied to create a vase to hold spring flowers from the garden or peonies ordered from the grocery store and kept in the bottom of the refrigerator to keep the buds from opening too early.  Memorial morning men dressed in suits and ties, and women wore their Sunday dresses with hats and gloves to go to the cemetery to put flowers on the graves.  It was important to arrive early enough to get the graves decorated with time to stroll through the cemetery admiring the decorations and visiting with friends and neighbors, especially those who now lived out of town and returned for the annual pilgrimage to decorate the graves.  The picture is of my parents, aunts, and uncles in about 1949.

About 10 o'clock the high school band, playing patriotic songs, would march from the school to the cemetery, and a ceremony would be held at the Memorial for veterans, with two of the best young trumpeters slipping away to hide behind large gravestones or trees to echo the playing of Taps.  Memorial Day was always May 30th, and no one considered going to the lake or the beach.  It was a day to remember the dead, not a day for recreation.  When the memorial service ended, the band marched away, only going as far as the end of the cemetery before students raced to their parents' cars to shed the hot, wool band uniforms.  The crowd gradually disbursed, many gathering for large family dinners.  Afterward, when the women retired to the kitchen to wash dishes and gossip and the men found comfortable chairs in the living room where they could intermittently visit and nap, the kids would slip away to meet their friends at the swimming pool, which opened for the summer season that afternoon.  I am the girl with the tenor saxophone, marching in one of those hot wool band uniforms.

Those days have disappeared.  With Memorial Day turned into a holiday weekend, graves are still decorated at the Farmington Cemetery, but the flowers are primarily silk and the decorating is often done early so people can travel somewhere for the long weekend.  Jeans are typically worn for the practical business of anchoring the silk flower arrangements in the soil to stay in place through the weekend in the likely chance of strong spring winds.  There is still a VFW honor guard that marches on Memorial Day, but the music is provided by a CD player rather than the high school band.  People do linger for a while to visit after the memorial services, but the crowd dwindles each year, it seems.  There are still some families that have traditional dinners, and kids whose parents have not taken them to the lake still gather at the swimming pool, if it is the opening day of the summer.  My husband is one of the men in the VFW honor guard at the "new" Veterans' Memorial.

I used to tease my mother-in-law not so many years ago when she would ask us to drive her through the cemetery, where she would comment as we passed by the graves, speaking of those buried there as if she were pointing out residences along the streets of the town.  Now she occupies one of those cemetery lots we once drove past, and my husband and I find ourselves driving through the cemetery, speaking of friends and parents of friends buried there, just as she once did.  Since doing the research about Isaac's neighbors from the late 1800s, I now have several more graves whose occupants I almost feel that I know, and I give Isaac's old neighbors a nod as we drive by.  This is the "old" Veterans' Memorial to which our high school band once led the honor guard.