Sue Landon Vaughan
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Sue Landon Vaughan (October 12, 1835 – July 22, 1911) was an American artist and writer best known for falsely claiming to have originated the
Memorial Day Memorial Day (originally known as Decoration Day) is a federal holiday in the United States for mourning the U.S. military personnel who have fought and died while serving in the United States armed forces. It is observed on the last Monda ...
holiday.


Early life

Susan Hutchinson Adams was born in
Missouri Missouri is a state in the Midwestern region of the United States. Ranking 21st in land area, it is bordered by eight states (tied for the most with Tennessee): Iowa to the north, Illinois, Kentucky and Tennessee to the east, Arkansas t ...
in 1835, the daughter of John Adams and Mary Gill, she was educated at Fielding Institute, Lindonwood College and Fulton Female College in Missouri and taught school in Jackson, Mississippi in 1865.


Personal life

She married Cornelius Lewis Neville Vaughan in San Francisco, California in 1876. Her husband died in 1893 and she moved to
Arlington, Virginia Arlington County is a county in the Commonwealth of Virginia. The county is situated in Northern Virginia on the southwestern bank of the Potomac River directly across from the District of Columbia, of which it was once a part. The county ...
to live with her sister Sallie Adams.


Claim to fame

Vaughan claimed to have started the Memorial Day holiday on April 26, 1865. This date and her name appear on the southeast portion of the
Confederate Monument In the United States, the public display of Confederate monuments, memorials and symbols has been and continues to be controversial. The following is a list of Confederate monuments and memorials that were established as public displays and symb ...
in
Jackson, Mississippi Jackson, officially the City of Jackson, is the capital of and the most populous city in the U.S. state of Mississippi. The city is also one of two county seats of Hinds County, along with Raymond. The city had a population of 153,701 at t ...
. Briefly, the story goes that Vaughan (Adams, at the time) was at a friend’s home north of Jackson, Mississippi on the night of April 25, 1865. Around midnight, two couriers arrive to tell them that their army is on the verge of surrender. Vaughan grabs a pencil and scrap of paper to write a plea to the "daughters of the Southland" to garland the graves of the dead soldiers the next day. The note is pinned to the jacket of one of the couriers who rushes to the newspaper office to have it printed in the next day’s paper.  The following morning everyone meets at the cemeteries and the graves are heaped with flowers, starting the Memorial Day holiday. She apparently wrote several similar versions of the story. The Mississippi Archives preserves a letter Vaughan wrote in 1897 describing the circumstances surrounding her inauguration of the holiday. Many of the details differ from another version of the story published in the ''Confederate Veteran'' magazine in 1898. In their book, ''The Genesis of the Memorial Day Holiday in America'', Bellware and Gardiner take issue with Vaughan’s claim. There is no contemporaneous evidence of her actions, despite claiming that she wrote her appeal in the ''Mississippian'' newspaper and no record of any witnesses to corroborate her story. In addition, the details she describes do not match the historical record of the surrender of General Taylor to General Canby at the War’s end. Her story is similar to the verifiable account of Mary Ann Williams. Williams wrote a letter to the press in March 1866 that was reprinted throughout the South. She proposed an annual decoration custom starting on April 26, 1866, the anniversary of Johnston's surrender to Sherman. Vaughan's claim was determined to be just one of the many hoaxes that arose to explain the origin of the holiday. Vaughan attempted to capitalize on her claim by copyrighting a couple of drawings she made in 1908 and selling them as postcards.


Death

Aged and destitute, Vaughan applied to the Masonic and Eastern Star home for the District of Columbia and was admitted in 1909. She died there in 1911. She is buried at Mount Olivet United Methodist Church in Arlington.


References

{{DEFAULTSORT:Vaughan, Sue Landon 1835 births 1911 deaths Educators from Missouri 19th-century American educators 19th-century American women artists 19th-century American women writers 19th-century American women educators