From the accidental death of Union Private Daniel Hough on the parade ground of Fort Thomas Sumter on Sunday, April 14, 1861, through the deaths encountered in the battle of Palmito Ranch, Texas, on May 12-13, 1865, more than 618,000 American soldiers died ("Billy Yanks" and Johnny Rebs" combined) in the American Civil War.

Around 4 million Civil War soldiers had fought each other from 1861 to 1865. Albert Woolson, the last of 2.26 million Yankee soldiers killed, was buried Aug. 6, 1956, at the age of 109.

Walter Williams, the last Confederate soldier, was buried on Dec. 23, 1959. He was 117.

On May 31, 2004, Alberta Martin, the last widow of a Civil War veteran, died in Enterprise, Ala. Mrs. Martin's body lay in repose at the first White House of the Confederacy in Montgomery as Gov. Bob Riley placed a wreath of magnolias beside her wooden casket.

This poor sharecropper's daughter, born in 1906, had asked that a Confederate battle flag cover her casket. Mrs. Martin, the belle of 21st Century Confederate history buffs, died as the United States was celebrating Memorial Day 2004 and nearly 140 years after the Civil War ended.

It was decreed long ago that such individuals, as mentioned above, would not be forgotten for their sacrifices.

There is much confusion concerning the official origin of Memorial Day.

Formerly known as "Decoration Day," this holiday had its origin in the south. In the spring, before the close of the Civil War, women and children decorated the graves of their dead soldiers with flowers.

For a generation

after 1868, the day was consistently observed as "Decoration Day." Within a year after the War, April 26, 1866, several southern women from Columbus, Miss., had begun the custom of decorating the graves of the Confederate dead at nearby Shiloh battlefield.

The women also strewed flowers upon the graves of the Union combatants there.

Carbondale, Ill., lays a claim to holding a local and informal Memorial Day observance on April 29, 1866. The United States government certified Waterloo, N.Y., as the official birthplace of Memorial Day in 1966.

The people of Waterloo officially honored soldiers who had died in the Civil War on May 5, 1866, by closing all businesses and decorating soldiers' graves there.

To add "national, official status" to Memorial Day, history must refer to the closing of an order written by General John Alexander Logan, national commander of the Grand Army of the Republic.

In Logan's Order No. 11, he uttered: "Let no ravages of time testify to coming generations that we have forgotten as a people the cost of a free and undivided Republic."

This order No. 11 ordained May 30, 1868, as a day to honor dead of the Union cause in the Civil War.

Logan, the best known of Abraham Lincoln's political generals, was accused by some of "characteristically promoting the holiday to use the war dead for political advantage and 'waving the bloody shirt' to register Republican Party gains."

Well into the 20th Century, southern states publicly and vigorously celebrated their own Confederate Memorial Days on different dates. These dates were associated with the following events of the late Confederate States of America - General Joseph E. Johnston's surrender, Jefferson Davis' capture, Jefferson Davis' birthday and Robert E. Lee's birthday.

Although "Decoration Day" had a distinctively northern image at the beginning, the sectional division began to fade with the passage of time and deaths of Civil War veterans.

After World War I, a national Memorial Day spirit emerged. The last Monday in May was made a federal holiday by a law passed in 1971. Memorial Day now remembers all veterans of all American wars.

Prior to moving to Ironton in the fall of 1980, I lived in Rio Grande. I was made secretary-treasurer of the Rio Grande Memorial Association and served in that capacity for 10 years. Besides helping to sponsor the Annual Rio Grande Bean Dinner, I was to see that veterans' graves in 10 cemeteries around Rio Grande were remembered each Memorial Day.