It is upon us.

Memorial Day, often viewed as the unofficial opening of summer, is almost here.

Many local community and public pools will open for the long weekend.

Festive cookouts are planned.

Some readers may be packing their vehicles for an extended weekend stay at the beach, in the mountains or at a lake.

Stores are advertising holiday sales of everything from mattresses to appliances to summer fashions and more.

However, in the din of the possibility of summer fun the core of Memorial Day must not be dimmed.

Memorial Day honors the fallen in all wars.

The roots of the national observance of Memorial Day in the United States can be located in the Civil War, which left more than 600,000 soldiers dead, more than 1 million wounded and/or maimed and freed the enslaved, including one of my great-great-grandmothers.

It is now known among the first observances of Memorial Day was an event assembled by newly freed slaves about a month after the Confederacy surrendered in 1865.

Award-winning historian David Blight was researching a book on the Civil War when a curator at a library at Harvard University offered to let him look through some boxes of unsorted materials from Union veterans.

Blight unearthed a file labeled “First Decoration Day.” The file held a handwritten account by a Union veteran and the date of a news article in a New York newspaper of a march by freed slaves and others around a racetrack at Washington Race Course and Jockey Club in South Carolina. During the Civil War, according to historians, the Confederate army used the location as a prison for captive Unions troops. More than 250 of the captured died of disease and exposure and were buried in a mass grave behind the track’s grandstands.

Soon after the war’s end in April 1865, the newly freed slaves exhumed the mass grave and reinterred the bodies in a new cemetery.

And then May 1, 1865 came and as Dave Roos, writing for the website History.com, notes, “something even more extraordinary happened.”

According to news accounts of the event, approximately 10,000 people, many of whom were former slaves, gathered and paraded around the racetrack. Members of black Union regiments also marched as did school children. Church leaders also participated.

“It’s the fact that this occurred in Charleston at a cemetery site for the Union dead in a city where the Civil War had begun,” Blight said in the news article by Roos. “And that it was organized and done by African American former slaves is what gives it such poignancy,” Blight continued.

In an interview available online, Blight, who details the history-making happening in his book “Race and Reunion,” notes the nation had to forge and re-imagine a new union, a new nation and a new republic in the wake of the Civil War.

Memory played and continues to play a role in the process of how Memorial Day is observed.

Local communities, including Emmaus and Macungie, will mark Memorial Day with parades and ceremonies at local cemeteries to honor many local heroes who have fallen in all wars.

Many readers and others may observe Memorial Day by flying an American flag at half-staff until noon and then raise the flag to full staff.

Many may choose to observe Memorial Day by pausing 3 p.m. local time to participate in the National Moment of Remembrance, an observance enacted by Congressional legislation in 2000.

You may choose to wear a red poppy, a tribute growing from the devastation of World War I.

Or you may choose to remember those in the military in your family. I know I will think of my dad and his brothers as well as my mother’s brothers who served along with the grandfather of one of my friends who was a prisoner of war in World War II.

And then I just might enjoy a burger on the grill.

April Peterson

editorial assistant

East Penn Press

Salisbury Press