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I spent some time researching this day of reverence. To be quite honest I didn't know the difference between it and Veterans Day. Memorial Day is the day we honor those that paid the ultimate sacrifice in the service of our armed forces. Every year my boys donate a morning on the weekend before the holiday at the largest cemetery in our area to place flags at graves of those who are remembered. Returning volunteers are rotated through the cemetery to see different headstones - names - service branches - burial areas. Again being honest, I drove them there and picked them up when done, a situation I will change next year.
Memorial Day, originally called Decoration Day which started shortly after the Civil War, is a day of remembrance for those who have died in service of the United States of America.
Going home
In The Arms Of An Angel
Along with those who made the ultimate sacrifice we need to remember the families who suffered this loss..
Heaven Was Needing A Hero
Edit: Lastly, being a history buff, I found this article interesting.> Forgetting Why We Remember There are many claims to being the 1st event to many different holidays but this one seems to to have credence.
The largest of these events, forgotten until I had some extraordinary luck in an archive at Harvard, took place on May 1, 1865. During the final year of the war, the Confederates had converted the city’s Washington Race Course and Jockey Club into an outdoor prison. Union captives were kept in horrible conditions in the interior of the track; at least 257 died of disease and were hastily buried in a mass grave behind the grandstand.
After the Confederate evacuation of Charleston black workmen went to the site, reburied the Union dead properly, and built a high fence around the cemetery. They whitewashed the fence and built an archway over an entrance on which they inscribed the words, “Martyrs of the Race Course.”
The symbolic power of this Low Country planter aristocracy’s bastion was not lost on the freedpeople, who then, in cooperation with white missionaries and teachers, staged a parade of 10,000 on the track. A New York Tribune correspondent witnessed the event, describing “a procession of friends and mourners as South Carolina and the United States never saw before.”
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I spent some time researching this day of reverence. To be quite honest I didn't know the difference between it and Veterans Day. Memorial Day is the day we honor those that paid the ultimate sacrifice in the service of our armed forces. Every year my boys donate a morning on the weekend before the holiday at the largest cemetery in our area to place flags at graves of those who are remembered. Returning volunteers are rotated through the cemetery to see different headstones - names - service branches - burial areas. Again being honest, I drove them there and picked them up when done, a situation I will change next year.
Memorial Day, originally called Decoration Day which started shortly after the Civil War, is a day of remembrance for those who have died in service of the United States of America.
Along with those who made the ultimate sacrifice we need to remember the families who suffered this loss..
Edit: Lastly, being a history buff, I found this article interesting.> Forgetting Why We Remember There are many claims to being the 1st event to many different holidays but this one seems to to have credence.
The largest of these events, forgotten until I had some extraordinary luck in an archive at Harvard, took place on May 1, 1865. During the final year of the war, the Confederates had converted the city’s Washington Race Course and Jockey Club into an outdoor prison. Union captives were kept in horrible conditions in the interior of the track; at least 257 died of disease and were hastily buried in a mass grave behind the grandstand.
After the Confederate evacuation of Charleston black workmen went to the site, reburied the Union dead properly, and built a high fence around the cemetery. They whitewashed the fence and built an archway over an entrance on which they inscribed the words, “Martyrs of the Race Course.”
The symbolic power of this Low Country planter aristocracy’s bastion was not lost on the freedpeople, who then, in cooperation with white missionaries and teachers, staged a parade of 10,000 on the track. A New York Tribune correspondent witnessed the event, describing “a procession of friends and mourners as South Carolina and the United States never saw before.”
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