What is Decoration Day? Here’s how SLO County remembered military dead in 1879
Memorial Day became an official federal holiday in 1971, but its origins go back to 1868 when Decoration Day was set aside to remember those killed during the Civil War.
After the Civil War ended in 1865, the one common thread was the sense of loss.
A frequently cited estimate says 620,000 Union and Confederate soldiers died in the war between the states.
But new research increases the number of deaths by more than 20% to 750,000.
More American lives were lost in the Civil War than in both World War I and World War II combined.
The impact of the loss is magnified by the comparatively small U.S. population at the time, which was one-tenth the size it is today.
Many of the fallen left behind widows and orphans.
At least two Tribune editors — Horatio Rembaugh and George Staniford — served in the Union Army during the Civil War.
Staniford was an infantryman in the bloodiest battle of the Civil War in 1862, fighting in a Maryland cornfield by the banks of Antietam Creek.
After 12 hours of savage combat, 23,000 people were either dead, wounded or missing in action. That’s about 5,000 more people than the population of Arroyo Grande, San Luis Obispo County’s fourth largest city.
The Battle of Antietam remains the single bloodiest day in American military history.
Tribune editor Myron Angel had one year of training at West Point before quitting to leave for the California Gold Rush in 1849. Many of Angel’s graduating classmates served as officers during the Civil War almost a decade later.
Angel briefly helped raise a company of volunteer infantry in California during the Civil War.
Tribune editors were generally pro-Union and Republican, and the competing newspapers in town often had southern sympathy.
Tennessee-born Hugh Hanks Doyle was founded the San Luis Obispo Mirror in 1880. During the war, he worked as a printer at the pro-Confederate Memphis Appeal until Union troops took that Tennessee city.
Doyle then moved to Vicksburg, Mississippi, and witnessed Union General Ulysses S. Grant’s successful siege and capture of the Mississippi River stronghold.
Vicksburg residents were reduced to eating their mules and living in caves to avoid shelling. The Vicksburg newspaper was printed on scraps of wallpaper as the siege cut off supplies.
Union Gen. Frederick Steele led a division under the command of General William T. Sherman during that campaign.
San Luis Obispo residents would eventually form the Fred Steele branch of the Grand Army of the Republic, a Union veterans group.
Steele’s brothers George, Isaac and Edward owned 48,000 acres in the San Luis Obispo County, including the Corral de Piedra Rancho.
The first indexed mention of Decoration Day in the Tribune was published on May 19, 1877, and cites U.S. Senator Newton Booth’s oration at the Pavilion in Sacramento.
The first full article on Decoration Day ran in the Tribune on May 24, 1879, 14 years after the end of the Civil War.
Staniford was Tribune editor at the time.
Decoration Day
Mr. Edward Tizzard— familiarly known as “Old Ned,” the bootblack — is the only member of the semi-military organization known as the Grand Army of the Republic, resident in San Luis Obispo.
It is the custom of this society on Decoration Day — May 30th — to visit the last resting place of Union soldiers, and scatter flowers upon their graves.
This beautiful ceremony is observed throughout the United States, and it is gratifying to know that in those national cemeteries where the Union and Confederate dead lie side by side, the hand of affection bestows its tribute of flowers as freely upon the tomb of him who wore the gray as it does upon the grave of the Union dead.
Old Ned has received orders from the commander of his Post to observe, the day and follow the custom of the Grand Army, if there are any soldiers buried in either of the cemeteries near this city.
Ned does not know of any, and requests us to make the inquiry for him.
If any of our readers know of the burial of any ex-soldiers in this city they will confer a favor on Ned by informing him of the fact.
We are free to affirm that if there are any such made known, their graves will receive a floral offering as beautiful as any in the land, on that memorial day.
