Galesburg Reporter

Sen. Win Stoller (R-Peoria) marked Memorial Day with a Facebook post.

“We remember and honor our military men and women who served and died protecting our freedom,”  Stoller posted.

What we now know as Memorial Day was originally called Decoration Day. The first Decoration Day occurred on May 30, 1868, a few years after the end of the Civil War. According to History.com,  the day was created by proclamation of Major General John Logan of the Grand Army of the Republic. The observance was held to honor those who died “in defense of their country during the late rebellion.”

Memorial Day became a federal holiday in 1971.

“Although not known by many today, the early evolution of the Memorial Day holiday was a manifestation of Lincoln’s hope for reconciliation between North and South,” the late Richard Gardiner, who was a professor at Columbia State University, wrote in a column in the Kansas Reflector.

Logan was an Illinois resident. A celebration in Carbondale, on April 29, 1866, is thought to be the first community-wide observance of Decoration Day, Journal Courier reported, and 212 veterans from the area participated. The Veteran's Administration website wrote that a stone in a Carbondale cemetery carries the statement that the first Decoration Day ceremony took place there on that day. Carbondale was the wartime home of Logan. 

Gardiner added in his column that Francis Miles Finch, a Northern judge, academic and poet, wrote a poem titled “The Blue and the Gray” that showed forgiveness to the South during the Civil War. The professor said Logan knew of Finch’s sentimentalism. 

“Almost immediately, the poem circulated across America in books, magazines and newspapers,” Gardiner wrote in the column. “By the end of the 19th century, school children everywhere were required to memorize Finch’s poem. The ubiquitous publication of Finch’s rhyme meant that by the end of 1867, the southern Memorial Day holiday was a familiar phenomenon throughout the entire, and recently reunited, country.”

Approximately 25 places have been named in connection with the origin of Memorial Day, many of them in the South where most of the war dead were buried.