Mackinac Island’s Memorial Day observance to include ceremony started by soldiers in 1880s

MACKINAC ISLAND – Memorial Day will get the Mackinac Island treatment during a short ceremony planned for next week.

Mackinac State Historic Parks will hold a brief and informal Memorial Day observance on Monday, May 30 at 8:30 a.m. The ceremony will begin behind Fort Mackinac at the Avenue of Flags and continue at the Post Cemetery.

“We are pleased to continue the tradition of Decoration Day at Fort Mackinac as the soldiers would have done historically,” said Steve Brisson, Mackinac State Historic Parks Director. “We encourage all to attend this simple and solemn commemoration with us.”

Costumed interpreters will lead attendees from Fort Mackinac to the Post Cemetery and perform a short ceremony and salute, following in the footsteps of what the soldiers stationed at Fort Mackinac in the 1880s would have done.

Brisson will speak at the ceremony while interpreters lay a wreath on the grave of Captain Edwin Sellers, the man who started the island’s Memorial Day tradition in 1883.

Sellers, who fought in several major Civil War battles, including Bull Run, Antietam, Fredericksburg, and Gettysburg, received three brevet promotions for “gallant and meritorious service” during the war.

He took command of Fort Mackinac in 1879, and lived with his wife, Olive, and four sons in the commanding officer’s house west of the fort.

Soldiers will then fire a rifle salute and TAPS is traditionally played. Afterwards, the procession will march back to Fort Mackinac.