Memorial Day Ceremony held at Mill Springs
May 29—With the sound of gunfire and the playing of "Taps," the veterans laid to rest at Mill Springs National Cemetery were honored during the annual Memorial Day Ceremony.
A crowd of more than 150 turned out Monday to honor veterans and participate in what was once known as Decoration Day.
USCG Master Chief Petty Officer John Appicelli explained to the crowd the history of Memorial Day and how we came to celebrate it on the last Monday in May.
He described how the first official Decoration Day was celebrated in 1868 at the Arlington National Cemetery.
Among those present at the Arlington event was future president James Garfield, then an Ohio congressman. Appicelli quoted Garfield as saying on that day, "I am oppressed with a sense of the impropriety of uttering words on this occasion. If silence is golden, it must be here, besides the graves of 15,000 men whose lives were more significant than speech, and whose death was a poem, the music of which can never be sung."
However, there is evidence that the real first "Decoration Day" may have taken place just a few years before, in 1866, when a group consisting mostly of freed Black slaves held a parade at the Washington Race Course and Jockey Club Charleston, S.C., in in honor of Union soldiers who were killed at that site.
The track's field had been a "makeshift prison" for captured Union soldiers by the Confederate army, with more than 260 soldiers dying from exposure and disease.
The soldiers were originally buried in a mass grave, before a group of freed Black men and women reburied the bodies in a new cemetery.
Then, on May 1, a crowd of around 10,000 people held the parade, with thousands of school children bring bouquets of flowers.
The story of those events were kept tucked away in a box of documents for more than 100 years, before an American History professor named David Blight began researching a book in 1996.
According to an article found on history.com, a curator at Harvard's Houghton Library offered Blight a chance to look through two boxes of documents from Union veterans, and within those boxes Blight found references to a news report in a hand-written narrative that describe the event.
Appicelli then described to the crowd the origins of Poppy Day, a day originally celebrated in November, and which in many parts of the world still takes place in November in honor of Armistice Day, the ending of World War I.
"In 1968, the Uniform Monday Holiday Act Moved Memorial Day permanently to the last Monday in May," Appicelli said. "But the American Legion asked Congress to designate the Friday before Memorial Day as National Poppy Day. On Poppy Day, people are asked to wear a red poppy to honor the fallen and support the living who have served and are serving our nation."
The symbolism of the poppy comes from John McCrae's poem "In Flanders Fields," where McCrae wrote: "In Flanders Fields the poppies blow/Between the crosses, row on row..."
The poem was created in honor of a friend who died during WWI.
Along with Appicelli as the main speaker, American Legion Post 38 posted the colors and provided a 21-gun salute. Glenn Tarter provided "Taps," and a wreath was placed near the main flag pole of the cemetery's grounds.
Carla Slavey can be reached at cslavey@somerset-kentucky.com
