Fairmont’s Julia Pierpont is credited locally for her role.
As you remember our fallen heroes this Memorial Day weekend, take a moment to also remember 19th century Fairmont resident Julia Augusta Robertson Pierpont. Memorial Day has local origins across the Civil War–torn states, but one of the central origin stories goes back to her.
A little backstory: Mrs. Pierpont was the wife of Francis Pierpont, who is known as the Father of West Virginia. Mr. Pierpont, you may remember from 8th grade social studies, served as governor of the Restored Government of Virginia. The Restored Government was a crucial step in the formation of the independent state of West Virginia.
When West Virginia broke away from Virginia in 1863, Pierpont continued on as the governor of the Restored Government of Virginia, moving his administration to Alexandria, Virginia. Then, when the Civil War ended in 1865, the state government moved to Richmond, and Pierpont and his family moved to the governor’s mansion there.
In the spring of 1866, the story goes, Mrs. Pierpont and her friends lamented that the several hundred graves of Union soldiers in Richmond’s Hollywood Cemetery, not far from the governor’s mansion, were neglected. Richmond, of course, had been the Confederate capital during the war, and the beautifully landscaped, park-like cemetery overlooking the James River was a beloved final resting place for many thousands of Confederate soldiers—more than in any other cemetery. By contrast, the Union dead at Hollywood were buried in a treeless, poorly tended section. To give the fallen Union soldiers some love, Pierpont and a teacher from the African American school organized friends and students in the spring of 1866 to tidy the graves and decorate them with flowers.
Anecdotally, it wasn’t a popular move in Richmond. That’s supported by the fact that, in 1867, a new cemetery was established in Richmond for the remains of Union soldiers, and those graves were moved.
But that impulse to decorate Civil War soldiers’ graves was widely felt. National grief was raw in the early years after the war, and similar spring grave-decorating activities arose spontaneously across many of the young nation’s 35 states.
Fast forward to March 1868. Mary Logan, the wife of General John Logan, who headed up the influential Union veterans’ organization Grand Army of the Republic, left Washington, D.C., to visit Petersburg, Virginia, and found that the graves of Confederate soldiers there had been decorated with flowers, wreaths, and Confederate flags. She returned home and told her husband what she’d seen. He’d heard about other local practices, too, and he sent out an order designating May 30, 1868, as a day for decorating the graves of the Union soldiers who’d died in defense of their country. That became the first Decoration Day, now known as Memorial Day and celebrated on the last Monday in May nationwide.
In 2000, following a WVU and state agency research project into Julia Pierpont as an early decorator of the graves of war dead, Fairmont established Julia Augusta Robertson Pierpont Day. It’s celebrated on the Saturday before Memorial Day—that’s May 25, this year —as a day to tidy graves and decorate them in preparation for Monday observances.
Memorial Day has many origin stories, all of them meaningful. For us here in West Virginia, our Julia Pierpont was an early practitioner close to the source.
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