Memorial Day

It was a pleasant Sunday in October of 1864. A young teenage girl, Emma
Hunter, and her friend Sophie Keller, gathered some garden flowers and
placed them at the grave of Emma's father, Dr. Reuben Hunter. Dr. Hunter, a
surgeon in the Union Army, had died only a short while before. On that same
day, an older woman, Mrs. Elizabeth Meyer, was placing flowers a few sites
away on the grave of her son, Amos, a Private in the Union Army who had
fallen on the last day of the battle of Gettysburg. These women found in
their grief a common bond as they knelt together in that little burial
ground located in a quaint town in Central Pennsylvania where Mount Nittany
stands eternal guard over those at rest. Before the women left, they agreed
to meet again on the same day the following year in order to honor not only
their own but others who now might have no one left to kneel at their lonely
graves. The following year, what had been planned as a small informal
meeting turned into a community service. Just off Rt. 322, in the foothills
of the Alleghenies, you might pass right by this little town in the rolling
valley without realizing its historical significance - if not for a plain
little marker by the side of the road the reads: "Boalsburg, An American
Village - Birthplace of Memorial Day."