Sue Landon Vaughan

Born Susan Hutchinson Adams in Missouri 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.[1] She married Cornelius Lewis Neville Vaughan in San Francisco, California in 1876.[2] Her husband died in 1893 and she moved to Arlington, VA to live with her sister Sallie Adams.

Vaughan attempted to capitalize on her claim by copyrighting a couple of drawings she made in 1908 and selling them as postcards.[3] Aged and destitute, she applied to the Masonic and Eastern Star home for the District of Columbia and was admitted in 1909 and died there in 1911.[4] Vaughan is buried at Mount Olivet United Methodist Church in Arlington, VA.[5]

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 Jackson, Mississippi.[6]

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.[7]

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.[8]