Confederate Decoration Day

Columbus is one of two Mississippi towns claiming the first Decoration Day. Its story is the gentler one: on April 25, 1866, women carried flowers to Friendship Cemetery and decorated Union and Confederate graves alike, about 1,400 in all. Jackson claims an earlier date, in 1865. What the ritual grew into was the Lost Cause, the postwar effort to recast the Confederacy and its defense of slavery as honor. Mississippi made Confederate Memorial Day a state holiday in 1917. Crowds shrank after the First World War, but Confederate heritage groups still keep it.

Where it stands

Worth the stop nearby

• Tennessee Williams Welcome Center — steps away
  The 1875 Episcopal rectory where Tennessee Williams was born in 1911, moved to Main Street in the 1990s and now Columbus's welcome center and a National Literary Landmark.
• Waverley Mansion — 6.8 mi
  A National Historic Landmark mansion above the Tombigbee River, home of a plantation family that enslaved more than a hundred people, left empty for half a century before a family restored it.
• Howlin' Wolf Memorial and Blues Trail Marker — 15 mi
  A Mississippi Blues Trail marker and granite memorial on East Broad Street honoring Chester Burnett, who was born nearby in 1910 and became the Chicago blues giant Howlin' Wolf.
• Sam D. Hamilton Noxubee National Wildlife Refuge — 26 mi
  A 48,000-acre refuge of bottomland forest and lakes in Noxubee, Oktibbeha and Winston counties, rebuilt from worn-out farmland, with red-cockaded woodpeckers, alligators and winter eagles.

More markers nearby

• Columbus, Mississippi Blues — steps away
• Columbus — steps away
• Robinson Road — 0.2 mi
• Gleed's Corner — 0.3 mi