Remembrance of Memorial Days Past

Memoir opens a window to a different life.

In starting my research for a new family memoir about my great-great-great aunt, Mary Jewett Telford, I learned how flowers were used to commemorate Memorial Day over one-hundred years ago.

I’ve been reading through the “red book” (i.e., rule book) of an organization Mary Jewett Telford founded as a charter member and national corresponding secretary: the Woman’s Relief Corps (WRC). The WRC was formed in 1883 to assist the Grand Army of the Republic (GAR), a huge post-Civil War organization of Union veterans. Before the inception of the federal Veterans Administration, the WRC raised money for veterans relief, through entertainment, services, and membership dues. The Relief Committees of the local WRC “corps” (i.e., local chapters) buried veterans, supported homes for Civil War orphans, visited the sick, and helped satisfy the ”temporal wants” of veterans, widows, and orphans.

How did they use flowers on Memorial Day? They placed them in large bodies of water. In 1903, the Corps decided “That Corps adjacent to large streams or bodies of water strew floral tributes on the waters on Memorial Day in memory of our sailor-soldier dead, providing that it does not seriously conflict with ceremonies of other patriotic organizations” (The Woman’s Relief Corps Red Book Containing the Rules and Reulations of the Woman’s Relief Corps, Auxiliary to the Grand Army of the Republic, Adopted by Twenty-third National Convention, Denver, Colorado, 1905, Revised Edition, May 1914, page 155).

Mary Jewett Telford (1839-1906) received a Civil War pension for her service as the sole nurse in a Nashville hospital of over 1,000 wounded Union soldiers. She and her husband, Jacob Telford, adopted three girls who were Civil War orphans. She went on to be a church and temperance worker and was active in the Colorado woman’s suffrage movement.