But perhaps the most touching story of this special day’s origin comes from Boalsburg, a quaint little village in Centre County, Pa., just off Route 322 a few miles south of Penn State University, in the picturesque foothills of the Alleghenies. It’s only a dot on the map, and a casual driver might drive past it without even being aware that it is nestled there in the rolling valley beneath a coverlet of oaks and pines and cedars ”“ were it not for a plain little marker by the side of the road: “Boalsburg. An American Village ”“ Birthplace of Memorial Day.”
As Herbert G. Moore recorded for the National Republic Magazine in May 1948, the event happened in October 1864.
It was a pleasant Sunday and in the little community burial ground behind the village, the pioneers of colonial times slept peacefully side by side with the recently fallen heroes of the Civil War.
On this day a pretty teenage girl named Emma Hunter and her friend Sophie Keller decided to gather some garden flowers and to place them on the grave of Emma’s father, Dr. Reuben Hunter, a surgeon in the Union Army, who had died only a short while before. And on this same day, an older woman named Elizabeth Meyer elected to strew flowers on the grave of her son, Amos, a private in the Union ranks who had fallen on the last day of battle at Gettysburg, Pa.
And so the two girls and their friend met, kneeling figures at nearby graves…
There is a move among the descendants of Union Veterans (the Sons of Union Veterans of the Civil War) and the parallel women’s organizations to return to May 30 as Memorial Day. We don’t make July 4 part of a 3 day weekend – or Christmas Day – so why Memorial Day?
For the answer to that question, I’m afraid you’ll have to ask the thousands of Federal and State employees and merchants……the government workers who get a bonus day off, and the merchants who profit from it.