Decoration Day Celebration

ON MEMORIAL DAY, TAKE A STEP BACK IN TIME With the Moreland Hills Historical Society.

The Garfield replica cabin located on the Village grounds will be open to residents on Memorial Day, May 30th from 10:00am-1:00pm to commemorate the first “Decoration Day” of May 30, 1868.

148 years ago on May 30, 1868, on the first Decoration Day, James A. Garfield addressed several thousand people gathered at Arlington National Cemetery as a Civil War General and Republican Congressman, but not yet a President.  “If silence is ever golden,” Garfield said, “it must be beside 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.”

By proclamation of General John A. Logan of the Grand Army of the Republic, the first major Memorial Day observance was held to honor those who died “in defense of their country during the late rebellion.”  Known to some as “Decoration Day,” mourners honored the Civil War dead by decorating their graves with flowers.  On the first Decoration Day, following General Garfield’s speech at Arlington Cemetery, 5,000 participants helped to decorate the graves of the more than 20,000 Union and Confederate soldiers buried in the cemetery.

The replica Garfield cabin will be open to the public on Saturdays (June thru Sept) from 10:00am-1:00pm