05/24/2026
MEMORIAL DAY 2026
160 years ago this solemn occasion was started and continues today. Hopefully with community participation it will continue for another 160 years. We remember those who made the ultimate sacrifice allowing us to continue to live in a free country.
Tomorrow (May 25) the parade in Waddington starts at 10:30 am immediately followed by a service at the Memorial Park at the corner of Lincoln Avenue and LaGrasse Street.
Any students and adults interested in helping the WHA with our project to place poppies at the graves of all soldiers in Old and New Brookside as well as St. Mary’s cemeteries, please meet at the entrance of Old Brookside cemetery at 9:30 AM for instructions. We invite you to march with us in the parade by meeting at the bottom of Main Street at 10:20 AM.
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100 years ago this article describing Memorial Day origins appeared in the May 31, 1926 issue of the Ogdensburg Republican-Journal.
ORIGIN OF MEMORIAL DAY
The Memorial Day idea was born in a stately old colonial mansion of Columbus, Georgia, the home of Mrs. John Tyler, on April 26, 1866.
The wounds of the Civil War were fresh in the land. Aching hearts were stealing to cemeteries to bedeck the graves of sons and husbands who had died fighting for the blue or the gray. Thousands of others sought graves of those called missing and longed for even a grave to call their own.
It was then that Mrs. Tyler called together the women of her town and organized a Ladies Memorial Association. The women went from Mrs. Tyler's home to Linwood cemetery in Columbus where formal Memorial Day exercises were held, and the women solemnly pledged to carry on the sweet task of decorating the graves of the soldier dead on the same day each year.
Within a very few years, the idea had swept the nation until Memorial Day became a legal holiday so decreed by Congress. The date, however, is optional with the states themselves. Several southern states adhere to the original date of April 26. But most of the states celebrate memorial Day on May 30 when flowers are in bloom for decorating of the
graves.
General John A. Logan of Civil War fame is credited with the first general proclamation setting aside one Memorial Day each year as a day of tribute.
In 1868, when Logan was commander-in- chief of the G. A. R., story has it that his wife returned from a southern visit and told how the graves of each Confederate soldier at Petersburg was decorated with a wreath and a Confederate flag.
It was then that “Black Eagle” Logan issued an order from G.A.R. headquarters on May 5, 1868, making Memorial Day a northern as well as a southern custom.
