Under the baobab: No matter where Memorial Day started, it will always be special in Happy Valley

Thank you for your service.

Sisters and brothers, have a blessed Memorial Day, this day of remembrance for those service men and women who have joined the ancestors. It is a special day in our family. I served in the Navy during the ‘60s. I have four brothers-in-law who also served in the Army. Three of them went to West Point. In the current generation, one of the brothers has a son-in-law who is presently serving on active duty. Both of our fathers retired from the U.S. Army. They both served in World War II, Korea and Vietnam. One of those fathers, Colonel Francis B. Kane, passed last year. Now that the pandemic is waning our family is preparing his interment arrangements at Arlington National Cemetery.

Memorial Day is special in Happy Valley. The decorating of veterans’ graves is said to have begun in Boalsburg. In October of 1864 three women — Emma Hunter, Elizabeth Meyer, and Sophie Keller — met one Sunday to decorate the graves of three family members who had fallen during the Civil War. Elizabeth Meyer’s son, Amos, had been killed at the Battle of Gettysburg. After putting flowers on their graves, the women decorated the graves of fallen veterans of the Revolutionary War and the War of 1812. The holiday became known as Decoration Day until after World War II. Other towns claimed they were “first.”

The Civil War began on April 12, 1861 when Confederate forces fired on Fort Sumter in Charleston Harbor. Afterward the secessionists converted the Washington Race Course and Jockey Club into a prisoner of war camp. Captured Union troops were kept there under brutal conditions. Imprisoned outside, over 260 Union soldiers died from disease and exposure. Their discarded bodies were tossed into mass graves behind the grandstand. The city, a citadel of the Confederacy, was a bulwark of the slave trade. Over half of the enslaved Africans who came to America came through Charleston. The city fell to Union Forces in February 1865, just before Lee’s surrender at Appomattox in April.

The Confederate soldiers left; the Black folks stayed. Then according to reports in the New York Tribune and Charleston Courier: “One of the first things the recently emancipated men and women did was to give the fallen Union prisoners a proper burial. They exhumed the mass grave and reinterred the bodies in a new cemetery with a tall white washed fence inscribed with the words: ‘Martyrs of the Race Course.’ Then on May 1, 1865, a crowd of 10,000 people, mostly freedmen staged a parade around the racetrack. Three thousand Black schoolchildren carried bouquets of flowers and sang ‘John Brown’s Body.’ Members of the famed 54th Massachusetts and other Black Union regiments were in attendance and performed double-time marches. “

The “official” origin of Memorial Day is Waterloo, New York. The U.S. House of Representatives and Senate recognized Waterloo as the birthplace of Memorial Day. They passed Resolution 587 which reads in part, “Resolved that the Congress of the United States, in recognition of the patriotic tradition set in motion one hundred years ago in the Village of Waterloo, NY, does hereby officially recognize Waterloo, New York as the birthplace of Memorial Day ...” . The final official recognition came in the form of a Presidential Proclamation, signed by President Lyndon B. Johnson on May 26, 1966.

Whichever town began it, we, as the American people have continued to celebrate, to commemorate those who, as President Lincoln said, “gave the last full measure of devotion — that we here highly resolve that these dead shall not have died in vain — that this nation, under God, shall have a new birth of freedom — and that government of the people, by the people, for the people, shall not perish from the earth.”

This story was originally published May 31, 2021 at 7:00 AM.