Decoration Day An amazing sequence of events began to unfold the first year after the end of the War Between the States. As far back as April 25, 1866, some southern women from the little North Central Mississippi town of Columbus were decorating the graves of Confederate soldiers who had fallen at Shiloh, one of the bloodiest battles of the War. They placed fresh spring flowers on the graves of their fallen heroes, soon realizing the graves of the Union soldiers were bare because there were no family members to care for their burial sites and to memorialize them. The women began to lay flowers on the Union soldiers’ graves as well as the graves of their own Confederate dead. It was a day of remembrance of the young soldiers who had been reluctant to fight a cruel war that meant they would have to kill or wound their fellow countrymen. Three years after the end of the War, in May of 1868, modeling the tribute paid by the women of Columbus, Mississippi, Union