The First Decoration Day at Crown Hill: How Indiana Began to Keep Memorial Day

On May 30, 1868, a procession moved through Indianapolis toward the gates of Crown Hill. It was long and it was formal: a band at its head, then wagons carrying orphaned children — the children of dead soldiers — who would do the actual work of the day; then a Guard of Honor, a detachment of the Grand Army of the Republic, the Arsenal Guard, the fraternal lodges, the city police, the trustees of the cemetery, the clergy, and Governor Conrad Baker with the officers of the state. The Indianapolis Journal reported that at least ten thousand people came.

What they had come to do was simple. In the national cemetery at Crown Hill — the ground this series described in its last post, where Indianapolis had gathered its Union dead just two years earlier — the children would lay flowers on the soldiers’ graves. The day was called Decoration Day. This was the first one held at Crown Hill, and Indiana has kept it, in the same place, every year since.

This is the fourth and final post of the Hoosier Union History series’ Memorial Day weekend arc, and it is published on Memorial Day itself. The arc has moved through the forms of Union remembrance Indiana built — the monument at the center of the capital, the regimental stones on the battlefields, the national cemetery that gathered the dead. This post is about the day the country set aside to walk into those grounds and do the remembering out loud.

General Orders No. 11

The day had an author and a date. On May 5, 1868, General John A. Logan, Commander-in-Chief of the Grand Army of the Republic, issued General Orders No. 11. It designated May 30, 1868, “for the purpose of strewing with flowers or otherwise decorating the graves of comrades who died in defense of their country during the late rebellion.” The first national observance under the order took place that May 30 at Arlington National Cemetery.

The date itself was a choice. May 30 was not the anniversary of any battle of the war — not a victory, not a defeat — and by most accounts that was deliberate: the day was meant to belong to no single engagement and to no one’s triumph, only to the dead. It also fell late enough in the spring that flowers would be in bloom across most of the country, which mattered for an observance whose central act was the laying of flowers on graves.

The order did not invent the practice so much as it gathered it. In the last years of the war and the years just after it, communities across the country — North and South, Black and White — had been decorating soldiers’ graves with flowers on springtime “decoration days.” More than two dozen towns have, at one time or another, claimed to have held the first. What General Orders No. 11 did was give the scattered practice a single date, a national sponsor, and a name — and ask the whole reunited country to keep it together, on the same day.

The Grand Army in Indianapolis

The organization that issued that order had a Hoosier connection worth pausing on. The Grand Army of the Republic — the great veterans’ organization of the Union, and the subject of a companion post in the site’s Veteran Organizations series — held its first national encampment in Indianapolis. In November 1866, some 288 delegates from eleven states gathered at the Morrison Opera House, at Meridian and Maryland streets, to organize the GAR at the national level. Among the resolutions they adopted was a call for state and national legislation to provide for the education and the maintenance of the orphans and widows of dead soldiers.

Indianapolis would host the GAR’s national encampment again and again in the decades that followed — more times than any other city in the country. The organization that, less than two years after that first encampment, told the North to decorate its soldiers’ graves had been assembled, at the national level, on Hoosier ground. When Indiana kept the first Decoration Day in 1868, it was keeping a day issued by an order of an organization that had been nationally founded in its own capital.

The first Decoration Day at Crown Hill

The observance Indianapolis held on May 30, 1868, was not a small or improvised affair. It was a civic event on the scale of the largest the young city could mount. Ten thousand people, by the Journal’s count, is an enormous figure for the Indianapolis of 1868 — a substantial share of the city turned out to walk a procession to a cemetery.

The most telling detail of the day is the place given to the orphaned children. The wagons carrying the children of dead soldiers rode near the head of the procession, and the children did the actual decorating — the laying of flowers on the graves. The day’s central act was given to the people the war had most directly cost: the children of the dead, carrying flowers into a cemetery. The 1866 GAR encampment in that same city had resolved to provide for those orphans. The 1868 Decoration Day put them at the front of the line.

Around the children moved the rest of the city’s civic body — the GAR detachment of veterans, the Arsenal Guard, the Odd Fellows and the Scottish Rite Masons, the police, the cemetery’s trustees, the clergy, and the governor of Indiana. Decoration Day, from its first observance in Indianapolis, was understood as a thing the whole community did together, with the bereaved at its center and the institutions of the state arranged in support around them.

The longest-kept day

What makes the 1868 observance more than a historical footnote is what happened in every year that followed it. The Decoration Day ceremony begun at Crown Hill in 1868 has been held there every year since — in the same cemetery, for what is now more than a century and a half. It is described as the longest continuously held Memorial Day observance in Indiana.

That continuity is the quiet achievement. A single grand observance, however large, is an event. An observance kept without a gap for more than a hundred and fifty years — through later wars, through the deaths of the last Civil War veterans, through every change the state has passed through since 1868 — is a tradition. The first Decoration Day at Crown Hill mattered; the fact that the day after it, and the year after it, and the decade after it, Indiana kept coming back to the same ground is what turned a single ceremony into the way a state remembers.

The day itself changed names and changed dates as the country aged around it. “Decoration Day” gradually gave way to “Memorial Day,” the name in general use now, as the observance widened from the Civil War dead to the dead of every American war. In 1968 Congress moved the holiday from its fixed May 30 to the last Monday in May, effective in 1971, creating the long weekend the modern observance sits inside. The ceremony at Crown Hill carried through all of it — the same ground, the same purpose, under whatever name and on whatever Monday the country assigned.

The dead earn the page

This weekend’s arc set out to follow how Indiana remembers its Union dead, and it has moved through four forms of that remembrance. The monument at the center of Indianapolis honors the soldier in the largest and most general terms. The regimental stones on the battlefields carry the count of a single regiment on a single field. The national cemetery at Crown Hill holds the dead one named grave at a time. And Decoration Day — Memorial Day — is the day the living walk into that named ground and do the remembering in person, out loud, with flowers in their hands.

The Hoosier Union History series follows Indiana’s citizen-soldiers into the war and records what their service cost them. It is the documentary table beneath this site’s Memorial Day writing — the record of who the dead were, regiment by regiment and grave by grave. On the day itself, the work is the same as it was for the children in the wagons in 1868: go to the ground, find the names, and do not let the weekend end without saying them. The dead earn the page. They earn the flowers, and the minute, and the walk to the cemetery, just as surely.

Sources

• General John A. Logan, General Orders No. 11, Grand Army of the Republic, May 5, 1868.
• U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs, National Cemetery Administration — Memorial Day history.
• Indiana Archives and Records Administration — “Grateful Remembrance: Memorial Day, Crown Hill Cemetery, and Your Veteran Ancestors,” including the Indianapolis Journal account of the 1868 observance, in.gov/iara.
• Crown Hill Heritage Foundation — the Crown Hill Memorial Day observance, crownhillhf.org.
• Grand Army of the Republic — record of the first national encampment, Indianapolis, November 1866.
• The companion post on the Grand Army of the Republic, in the site’s Veteran Organizations series; and this series’ Posts 1 through 12, at the blog index.