Decoration Day in Brooklyn and Beyond

Originally published on Brownstoner in 2013 and revised for this page

(One of the Union soldiers at the Civil War memorial at Brooklyn’s Green-Wood Cemetery. Photo: sailingstonetravel.com)

Today we celebrate Memorial Day with food, festivities and perhaps even a day at the beach, on the semi-official start of the summer season. Perhaps you go shopping, taking advantages of all of the Memorial Day sales at practically every large department and discount store.

Because the experience of war, losing someone in war, military service, or even having a relative in the service is so foreign to many of us, it’s hard to conceive of this convenient holiday on the last Monday in May being anything more than just a blessed day off, a break in the schedule of hard work that we are all too familiar with. But it was not always so.

My parent’s generation were veterans of World War II, so war, national and personal sacrifice were something they were very familiar with, especially with the Korean War following right on its heels. I grew up in a small town upstate where patriotic parades took place on Memorial Day, the Fourth of July, and Veteran’s Day, with the school band marching down the village streets, followed by the local chapter of the American Legion, the Boy Scouts, Girl Scouts, the 4-H, the Grange, and anyone else who wanted to participate.

 Looking back, I’m surprised there was anyone left to line the streets, but there always was a crowd, waving flags and cheering. Our parade began at the school, wound through the town, and ended at the cemetery, where a very solemn ceremony of wreath laying took place, accompanied by prayer, a twenty-one gun salute fired by proud veterans, and ended with the lonely and poignant sound of taps echoing across the hills. The Viet Nam War was still dragging on, the years that I marched as a Girl Scout, but on that hill above Gilbertsville, time stood still, the ground was sacred, and even as a rebellious generation, we knew and honored those traditions.

It was as American as you could get, in a village cemetery high on a hill above the town, with lilacs in bloom, our uniforms hot and uncomfortable from marching up the steep hill, surrounded by the graves of townspeople, dating back from not only from the time of the 20th century’s wars, but as far back as the Civil War, even back to the Revolutionary War. It was an old and storied place, a fitting place for a holiday that began as “Decoration Day,” to honor the Civil War dead.

Laying flowers on the graves of soldiers lost in battle has been an old tradition in America. The Civil War, where men died by the thousands on American soil, some close to their own homes and families, made that tradition even stronger. It became the duty of women; the wives, mothers, sisters and relatives of the dead, to gather up fresh flowers and decorate the graves, honoring with beautiful blossoms and scents, the dead who perished horribly in a war on American soil, pitting brother against brother. The practice began before the war was even over, with the memorial cemetery at Gettysburg established in 1864.

The oldest recorded commemoration of the sacrifice of the Civil War dead took place in Charleston, South Carolina. There, in 1865, less than a month after the surrender of the Confederacy, a group of emancipated men and women gathered at the former Washington Race Course. The track and clubhouse had been a prison camp for Union Soldiers during the war. Hundreds of soldiers died under horrific conditions and were buried in a mass grave behind the grandstands.

The former slaves wanted to honor those who fought and died for their freedom and wanted to give them a proper burial. They exhumed the mass grave and reinterred the bodies in a new cemetery. On May 1, 1865, a crowd of ten thousand people, mostly freed people and some white missionaries, held a parade around the race track. 3,000 black schoolchildren carried bouquets of flowers and marched. Members of the famed 54th Massachusetts and other black Union regiments also marched and black ministers recited Bible verses.

When Charleston was rebuilt, Southerners had little interest in celebrating this historic event, when black citizens honored the Union dead, so the story disappeared from the city’s history. It was rediscovered, with documentation, by Yale professor David Blight in a group of unsorted Civil War documents in the library at Harvard, in 1996. Oral histories from the descendants of black Charleston residents corroborated the story. The importance of this first commemoration of the Union dead by freed people in the city where the war started is special to American history, and only now is this history becoming more well known to the general public.

There were memorial celebrations in cities both North and South, by war’s end and afterward. The Civil War cost so many their lives, over 600,000 in total, that the federal government began establishing military cemeteries initially only for the Union dead. Arlington Cemetery was established in 1865 in Virginia on land that once belonged to Robert E. Lee’s wife’s family. More military cemeteries followed north and south of the Mason-Dixon Line.

In 1868, General John A. Logan, the commander-in-chief of the Grand Army of the Republic (GAR), the Union Army’s Veteran’s Association, instituted the first “Decoration Day,” calling for it to be celebrated in cities and towns across the country. It would be a solemn day when graveyards were visited and decorated with flowers left by family members and volunteers. May 30th was chosen at random, coinciding with the optimal time of year for flowers to be in bloom. By 1890, every Northern state had declared the day a holiday, with many of the Southern states following suite.

The name “Memorial Day” started to be used in 1882, and gradually replaced “Decoration Day” as the official name of the holiday, although it was not the official name until 1967. In 1968, Congress passed the Uniform Monday Holiday Act, which made four holidays, including Memorial Day, on a Monday, in order to create a three-day weekend. Memorial Day became the last Monday in May, no matter what the date.

The Act did not take effect until 1971, although it took several years for all the states to comply with the new rules, which they all eventually did. Many people thought this move trivialized the holiday, making it more about sales and summer, rather than commemorating our country’s war dead, and the sacrifices of our military personnel and their families. But the Monday holiday remains.

Decoration Day in Brooklyn became a popular holiday, with parades and solemn visitations to cemeteries for commemorative services. Civil War veterans were a part of Brooklyn life until the 1920s, when the last few veterans died of extreme old age. Although Green-Wood Cemetery was the resting place of many of Brooklyn’s wealthiest people, it was also a large resting place for the Civil War dead. During the war, in 1862, the cemetery instituted a free veteran’s burial ground, called the “Soldier’s Lot.” Today, after careful research, it has been determined that there are over 3,300 Civil War soldiers buried there, and elsewhere in the cemetery.

The Civil War Soldier’s Monument was dedicated by the City of New York to its Civil War dead, and was built in 1869, only four years after the end of the war. It sits on the top of Battle Hill, the highest point of the cemetery, and portrays four soldiers in uniform, at the four sides of a granite pedestal and column. The soldiers are cast in zinc, with bronze plaques on the granite base. Since the day it was dedicated, this memorial, and all of the other memorials to soldiers dead from many more wars, has been a place of quiet and somber reflection upon the effects of war, both good and bad.

Brooklyn has always had her Memorial Day traditions, with parades, flags, and those same solemn ceremonies at cemeteries so large, my entire hometown could be set in one, and there would still be room. Even here, in a noisy city, the echo of taps, resounding from hill to hill, still reminds us of the importance of the day. Although we may not know those who have served or died, their sacrifices make our holiday possible. It is good that we remember.

( My Dad, Bruce S. Spellen. US Navy, 1940)