On Monday, May 29, the county will observe Memorial

On Monday, May 29, the county will observe Memorial Day with a service at noon at St. Stephens Episcopal Cemetery in Woodville.

The outdoor service has become a tradition, begun three years ago by the Rev. Jennings Hobson III and a group from Trinity Episcopal Church in Washington. But like the original Memorial Day observance, it has quickly taken hold and become a rite of the holiday for an increasing number of county residents.

Memorial Day had its origins, depending on the historian, either during or just after the Civil War.

Southern women, particularly, honored the war dead by visiting cemeteries and placing flowers on their graves. In most cases, they honored the Union soldiers buried in the South as well as the Confederate soldiers.

By 1867, the tradition had spread to nearly a dozen Southern cities.

Another version has the celebration beginning in 1864 in Boalsburg, Pennsylvania.

Emma Hunter, visiting the grave of her father, Col. James Hunter, commander of the 49th Pennsylvania Regiment and killed at Gettysburg, encountered another woman placing flowers on the grave of her son. The two women agreed to meet again at the cemetery, and the tradition was established.

Which ever version is correct, by 1867 observances were widespread across both the North and the South, prompting an editorial about the new tradition in the New York Tribune and a poem, “The Blue and the Gray,” by Francis Miles French.

In 1868, the first national observance was held on May 30. At Arlington National Cemetery outside Washington, President Ulysses S. Grant, a former general in the Union army, was among the guests. They listened as another veteran of the War Between the States, Gen. James A. Garfield, spoke about the sacrifice of the soldiers buried there:

“/ aw oppressed with a sense of the impropriety of uttering words on this occasion. If silence is ever golden, it must be here be