Holiday observances at one of the nation's oldest Memorial Day
commemorations honor the fallen but also reflect the tragic story of
the orphans whose treatment at the hands of the orphanage's matron
became a national scandal in the 1870s, said Walter Powell,
executive director of the General Society of Mayflower Descendants,
in Plymouth, Massachusetts, and formerly a long-time Gettysburg
resident and historian.
Soldiers' graves have been covered with blossoms each Memorial Day
since 1867, when General John Logan, the commander-in-chief of the
Grand Army of the Republic, proclaimed it a day “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.”
During that first observance, Philinda Humiston and her three
children, whose father, Union Sergeant Amos Humiston, died during
the Battle of Gettysburg in 1863, marched to the cemetery to
decorate graves of Union soldiers.
The Humistons were among the first residents of the National
Soldiers Orphans' Homestead in Gettysburg, which also housed widows.
The home's founding in 1866 was inspired by the discovery that a
dying Sergeant Humiston clutched an ambrotype image of his three
children, Frank, Freddie and Alice, in his hand, Powell said.
The flower-strewing tradition by orphans was repeated each
subsequent Memorial Day - once known as Decoration Day - until the
orphanage closed in December 1877 amid a national scandal. The
home's matron, Rosa Carmichael, was accused of physically abusing
the children and was later convicted of aggravated assault.
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It was then that the school children of Gettysburg carried on the
flower tradition, which took place again on Monday after a parade
that retraced President Abraham Lincoln's ride to the cemetery.
In a speech to the crowd, Major General Tony Cucolo, commander of
the U.S. Army War College, in Carlisle, Pa., said that each time a
soldier under his command died in combat, he visited the field
hospital where the body was brought and remembered the soldier with
a moment of silence.
“Each time I walked out of that hospital section and made that
lonely trek back to my command post, I was left wondering if I was
personally worthy of my soldier’s sacrifice – and I found myself
recommitting to live my life worthy of it… worthy of their
sacrifice,” he said.
(Editing by Barbara Goldberg, Steve Orlofsky and Dan Grebler)
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