Memorial Day flags placed

Auxvasse Boy Scout Justus Love sorts flags he was placing on soldiers' graves Wednesday at Hillcrest Cemetery in Fulton.
Auxvasse Boy Scout Justus Love sorts flags he was placing on soldiers' graves Wednesday at Hillcrest Cemetery in Fulton.

On Wednesday, volunteers from around Callaway County stooped over the graves of soldiers and inserted American flags by each one.
Over the buzz of lawnmowers and weed whackers operated by city workers in anticipation of Memorial Day, Allen Nelson, vice commander of the Fulton American Legion post, had explained the process.
"You want to get it (the flag) as close to the headstone as possible," he said.
Assisting in the effort were members of Auxvasse Boy Scout Troop 32, Wyatt Branson, Landon Morrison and Dekotah Nelson, plus Fulton Girl Scout Adrianna Branch and other volunteers. Later, another Troop 32 member, Justus Love, came to help.
Their mission was to place 350 flags on the graves of vets. Similar efforts were taking place Wednesday at other cemeteries, including flags on 700 soldiers' graves at Callaway Memorial Gardens.
"We do this every year, along with the veterans' dinner in November," Nelson said. "It honors the veterans - that's what Memorial Day is for."
Love said this is the fourth year he's helped place the flags.
"It makes me feel good," he said. "I'm doing something to remember these people who fought."
Memorial Day is Monday. It started with the Civil War, in which 620,000 soldiers died. In 1864, a group of women from Boalsburg, Pennsylvania, put flowers on the graves of their dead just after the Battle of Gettysburg. The next year, women in Vicksburg, Mississippi, did the same for soldiers in their cemetery.
Federal Memorial Day was established in 1888. Both Union and Confederate soldiers were remembered early on. Northern states were the first to recognize it, beginning with New York. Some southern states didn't adopt May 30 as Memorial Day until after World War I when those soldiers also were honored. Memorial Day is now the last Monday of May.
The World War I poem "In Flanders Fields" by John McCrea inspired the Memorial Day custom of wearing red artificial poppies. In 1915, a Georgia teacher and volunteer war worker, Moina Michael, began a campaign to make the poppy a symbol of tribute to veterans, "keeping the faith with all who died."
The sale of poppies has supported the work of the Veterans of Foreign Wars, and Fulton members started selling the red poppies this week, often outside local businesses.
Both Confederate and Union soldiers lie in Hillcrest Cemetery, together in the southwest corner. One is the grave of Isaac Newton Sitton, born in 1836 and died in 1905. His obituary, published in the Fulton Weekly Gazette, stated he was president of the Callaway Confederate Association.
"He was a member of the first company of Confederate soldiers raised in Callaway county, that of Gen. D.H. McIntyre, and spent the entire four years in the service of the south," his obit read. "Later, he was a captain of a company under Gen. Jo Shelby and finally surrendered in Texas. Captain Sitton was police judge of Fulton at the time of his death. He served two terms as assessor of the county and one term as representative in the general assembly. He was mayor of Fulton two years."
At one time, Fulton resident and Marine Bill Boyd used to decorate the veteran graves at Hillcrest Cemetery. Boyd, who died in 2002, started the tradition in the early 1980s. Nelson remembered him on Wednesday.
"I've been doing it since him," he said of the flag-placing tradition. "He taught me."