The First Decoration Day | Beaufort National Cemetery, Beaufort, South Carolina
Season 2 Episode 40
The Grim is opening the gate into an American holiday that isn't as old as time. Memorial Day feels timeless, as though it has always existed on the American calendar. But the holiday is younger than most realize, and its true origins are far stranger and more powerful than the version history chose to remember.
This episode opens the gate to Beaufort National Cemetery, a forty-four-acre Civil War cemetery in Beaufort, South Carolina, established by Abraham Lincoln in 1863, where more than 29,500 souls rest beneath moss-draped live oaks. Before walking those grounds, we follow the story backward to a Charleston racetrack in May of 1865, where nearly 10,000 people gathered for what may have been the earliest large-scale Memorial Day ceremony in American history. Most were formerly enslaved Black citizens. The story was nearly erased and wasn't rediscovered until historian David Blight found a handwritten account at Harvard in 1996.
Inside Beaufort, we meet the men whose lives give this cemetery its weight. Donald Conroy, decorated Marine pilot and the real-life inspiration for Pat Conroy's novel The Great Santini, rests beneath the same oaks where his character's fictional funeral was filmed. Joseph Simmons was born in 1899 on nearby St. Helena Island, fought at Belleau Wood, served with the Buffalo Soldiers in World War II, and spent thirty-four years in uniform, only to receive meaningful recognition from France weeks before his hundredth birthday. Ralph Henry Johnson was twenty years old when he threw himself onto a grenade in Vietnam on March 5, 1968, saving the men beside him and earning the Medal of Honor he would never hold.
Beaufort holds more than the dead. It holds the memories a nation tried to forget.
Descending once more into the hauntings of history on The Grim.
