05/25/2026
Most of us grew up thinking Memorial Day started with a federal proclamation and a ceremony at Arlington.
The actual origin is a little different -- and it happened just up the road from us.
On May 1, 1865, weeks after the Civil War ended, the Gullah Geechee community of South Carolina did something no one asked them to do.
The Washington Race Course had been used as a Confederate prison camp. Over 250 Union soldiers died there in captivity and were buried in a mass grave behind the grandstand. When the war ended, the Gullah Geechee community showed up. They spent two weeks exhuming those bodies and reburying them properly. They built a fence around the site and inscribed it with the words "Martyrs of the Race Course." Then ten thousand people, most of them newly freed, gathered to give those soldiers a funeral.
Nearly three thousand children led the procession, singing. Preachers spoke. Flowers were laid. They called it Decoration Day.
Three years later, in 1868, Union General John A. Logan made it official -- designating May 30th as a national day to decorate the graves of soldiers who died in the Civil War. The first national ceremony was held at Arlington National Cemetery. By 1890, every Northern state had made it an official holiday. After World War I, it expanded to honor the dead of all American wars.
In 1971 it became Memorial Day, moved to the last Monday in May.
However you spend today, we hope you carry with you the knowledge that this day was born from an act of grace, by people who had every reason to tend only to their own wounds and chose to honor someone else's fallen first.
That is what remembrance looks like at its finest. On this day, we honor all of our fallen and understand that without the sacrifices they have made we would not have the freedom we enjoy today.
We will never forget, nor let the legacy of America's brave soldiers fade.
