Memorial Day: Rooted in the kindness of two Michigan girls

By Patrice Johnson

The stakes of the bloody Civil War couldn’t have been higher. If the Confederates won, the nation would be a rift in two, and the Confederacy, founded on slavery, would emerge as a separate nation. If the Union Army prevailed, the economic foundation of the plantation-based South would be destroyed. Brothers were fighting brothers, and 1 of every 4 young men who trooped off to war died. Gravesites dotted the countryside, and before the war would finally grind to a close, approximately 620,000 soldiers would lay dead from combat, accident, starvation, and disease. 

According to the Historical Society of Michigan and its Michigan History Magazine, “Ella and Josephine May were in the thick of it. The girls—ages 8 and 13—were moving through enemy territory with Michigan’s Second Infantry Regiment. Their father, Franklin, was the regiment’s chaplain. As an officer, he was allowed to bring his family along.

Ella, Josephine, and their mother, Maria, had followed the chaplain from their home in Kalamazoo to Virginia. In Alexandria, Maria, who served as an unofficial nurse to the regiment, smuggled badly wounded Union soldiers into the city’s hospital for treatment. For her efforts, she was called “an angel of mercy from God.”

The Decoration Begins

On April 13, 1862, the one-year anniversary of the start of the war, the Mays were billeted in Arlington Heights, Virginia. Ella and Josephine walked around the grounds of a large estate—likely owned by Confederate General-in-Chief Robert E. Lee—and gathered wildflowers. With their hands full of blossoms, they came upon a grave of a soldier who died in a battle nearby. The girls placed flowers on top of it to honor the man who gave his life to save the Union.

On their way home, they picked more flowers and put them on all the graves they could find. When they told their mother, she decided to join them.

The next day, the Mays and friend Sarah Nicholas Evans covered 13 graves—both Union and Confederate—with flowers.

The Practice is Repeated

In 1863, two years into the war and again on April 13, they did the same thing, and the year after that, too. As the war slogged into its third year, they visited Fredericksburg and other battlegrounds in Virginia. People began to talk about what the family was doing and emulated their actions. Soon the idea of honoring fallen warriors spread to other states. There was no shortage of graves, and the war labored on.

The girls didn’t get a chance to lay flowers on the fourth anniversary of the war’s beginning because Lee surrendered his troops several days before. Michigan’s Second Infantry Regiment had participated in the campaign that brought victory to the Union Army.

By summer 1865, the regiment was mustered out of service, permitting the May family to return to Kalamazoo. Franklin May went back to his work as a Methodist minister, and Maria and their daughters settled into the lives they had led before the war took them away.

As the years passed, Ella finished school and Josephine developed her homemaking skills. Out East, though, where their father had served, the girls’ practice of decorating graves continued and to grow.

Congress made Decoration Day a federal holiday in 1888. Because of this law and the kindness of two young girls from Michigan, we now observe a single holiday—renamed “Memorial Day”—across the nation.

Adapted from “Memorial Day: How it all began,” Jackson Citizen Patriot, May 24, 2015, as excerpted from the Historical Society of Michigan, nonprofit publisher of Michigan History magazine.