Latest / The Grim: Haunted Cemeteries & Graveyard Tales / The First Decoration Day | Beaufort National Cemetery, Beaufort, South Carolina

Transcript

The First Decoration Day | Beaufort National Cemetery, Beaufort, South Carolina · The Grim: Haunted Cemeteries & Graveyard Tales

• 0:13
  Kristin: Grim morning and welcome to the Grim.
• 0:16
  Kristin: I'm your host, Kristen.
• 0:18
  Kristin: On today's episode, we'll be opening the gate and entering Beauford National Cemetery, located in Beauford, South Carolina.
• 0:25
  Kristin: The aroma of coffee mingles in the air.
• 0:28
  Kristin: The gates stand open.
• 0:30
  Kristin: Step carefully.
• 0:31
  Kristin: It's not a descend into the hauntings of history.
• 0:34
  Kristin: Ah, yes, summer.
• 0:36
  Kristin: For so many begins the moment Memorial Day appears on a calendar, the unofficial start of bright days, warm air, crowded beaches, and long evenings beneath the sun.
• 0:46
  Kristin: Yet holidays often become traditions people celebrate whatever asking why they exist or where they began.
• 0:52
  Kristin: Last summer the Grim took a much-needed break, something I'll likely do soon as I prepare for season three.
• 0:57
  Kristin: But before I close the gates for a little while, there's still a few graveyards left to wander.
• 1:02
  Kristin: This may also marks two years of the Grim, a milestone I never imagined when this journey first began.
• 1:08
  Kristin: Rather than creating a celebratory episode, I thought it more fitting to open the gate to a cemetery tied directly to remembrance itself.
• 1:16
  Kristin: A place that embodies everything the Grim has always been about.
• 1:19
  Kristin: Memory, loss, forgotten history, and the stories buried beneath the surface.
• 1:24
  Kristin: That place is Beauford National Cemetery.
• 1:27
  Kristin: Memorial Day now feels timeless, as though it's always existed within the American calendar, a sacred day devoted to those who gave their lives in war.
• 1:35
  Kristin: Yet the holiday is far younger than many realize.
• 1:38
  Kristin: Despite America celebrating 250 years as a nation, Memorial Day was not recognized as a federal holiday until 1971.
• 1:47
  Kristin: So where did it begin and why?
• 1:49
  Kristin: America had seen death in war before, but nothing compared to the devastation of the Civil War.
• 1:55
  Kristin: Old battlefield tactics collided with increasingly modern weaponry, creating casualties on a scale the nation had never witnessed.
• 2:03
  Kristin: Entire communities were shattered.
• 2:05
  Kristin: Families desperately searched for lost loved ones.
• 2:08
  Kristin: The overwhelming number of dead also created something America had never truly needed before on such a scale: national cemeteries.
• 2:17
  Kristin: Many communities claim the origins of Memorial Day, though Waterloo, New York is officially recognized as its birthplace.
• 2:24
  Kristin: Yet remembrance ceremonies had already begun appearing throughout the country long before any official designation existed.
• 2:30
  Kristin: Families decorated graves with flowers while communities gathered in cemeteries to honor the fallen.
• 2:36
  Kristin: Because of this, the holiday was first known as Decoration Day.
• 2:39
  Kristin: The practice emerged around 1864 near the closing years of the Civil War, with the first nationally recognized observance taking place at Arlington National Cemetery on May 30, 1868.
• 2:52
  Kristin: For generations, many believe these observances began primarily in the North.
• 2:56
  Kristin: But buried within forgotten archives was evidence of another ceremony, when largely erased from history.
• 3:03
  Kristin: Years later, Yale historian David W.
• 3:05
  Kristin: Plythe stumbled across a handwritten account while researching unsorted Union veteran materials within the Harvard Library.
• 3:13
  Kristin: The documents carried a simple label, First Decoration Day, and so was the testimony of a veteran describing a mass remembrance ceremony held in Charleston in 1865.
• 3:24
  Kristin: The location seemed strange at first, a racetrack, but during the war the Washington Race Course and Jockey Club had been transformed into a Confederate prison camp for captured Union soldiers.
• 3:35
  Kristin: Once an elegant gathering place for the city's elite, it became a place of suffering.
• 3:40
  Kristin: More than 260 Union prisoners died there from disease, starvation, and exposure, while confined in the open air infield, their bodies hastily buried in a mass grave behind the grandstands.
• 3:52
  Kristin: When Charleston fell and the Confederate troops abandoned the city, formerly enslaved black residents remained behind.
• 3:59
  Kristin: One of the first acts carried out by these newly emancipated men and women was to recover the Union dead.
• 4:05
  Kristin: They exhumed the mass grave and reburied the soldiers properly within a newly created cemetery, enclosed with a whitewash fence bearing the words Martyrs of the Race Course.
• 4:14
  Kristin: Then on May 1st, 1865, something extraordinary happened.
• 4:18
  Kristin: According to reports later uncovered in the New York Tribune and the Charleston Courier, nearly 10,000 people gathered at the racetrack for a memorial procession.
• 4:27
  Kristin: Most were formerly enslaved black citizens, joined by missionaries and Union troops.
• 4:32
  Kristin: Thousands of black schoolchildren carried flowers and sang John Brown's body, while members of the famed 54th Massachusetts Volunteer Inventory marched through the grounds as ministers read scripture aloud over the graves of the fallen.
• 4:46
  Kristin: If the accounts are accurate, the ceremony may represent the earliest large-scale Memorial Day observance in American history.
• 4:53
  Kristin: Yet the story faded almost completely from public memory.
• 4:56
  Kristin: As Charleston rebuilt after the war, many white residents had little interest in preserving the memory of a ceremony led by formerly enslaved people, honoring the Union soldiers.
• 5:06
  Kristin: It didn't fit the version of history many wished to tell.
• 5:10
  Kristin: Over time, the racetrack disappeared, and the graves were eventually relocated to Beaufort National Cemetery through the support of northern benefactors.
• 5:18
  Kristin: By the time Blight uncovered these forgotten documents in 1996, the ceremony had nearly vanished from history entirely.
• 5:26
  Kristin: But perhaps that's why places like Beaufort matter so deeply.
• 5:30
  Kristin: Cemeteries do more than hold the dead.
• 5:32
  Kristin: They hold memory itself, even the memories a nation tries to forget.
• 5:37
  Kristin: Today, visitors to National Beaufort Cemetery can still find the graves of the Charleston dead alongside a plaque counting the story of the Forgotten Decoration Day ceremony, tying the cemetery to Memorial Day in many ways many may never know.
• 5:50
  Kristin: The cemetery itself was established on February 10, 1863, by Abraham Lincoln.
• 5:56
  Kristin: It was one of the six national cemeteries created in the South for the reburial of Union soldiers and sailors lost during the Civil War.
• 6:04
  Kristin: At first, the ground stretches across 22 acres of South Carolina coastland.
• 6:08
  Kristin: Over time, they expanded to 44.
• 6:11
  Kristin: Today, more than 29,500 souls rest beneath this soil, veterans and their families from nearly every major American conflict.
• 6:20
  Kristin: Like many national cemeteries, Beauford can at first feel stark in its cemetery.
• 6:24
  Kristin: Row after row of identical white headstones stand in near perfect order, almost too simple for lives marked by such sacrifice.
• 6:33
  Kristin: But the feeling changes as you move deeper into the grounds.
• 6:37
  Kristin: Buford carries a quieter kind of beauty.
• 6:40
  Kristin: The town itself feels suspended in another century, a quiet landscape of marshes, solitaire, and live ancient oaks draped in Spanish moss.
• 6:49
  Kristin: The cemetery mirrors that stillness.
• 6:52
  Kristin: Narrow roads wind beneath shadowed branches.
• 6:54
  Kristin: Well graves disappear beneath curtains of moss and filled with southern light.
• 6:59
  Kristin: The earliest burials here were soldiers who died from wounds and disease in nearby military hospitals after the Battle of Port Royal.
• 7:06
  Kristin: As the war direct on the cemetery grew.
• 7:09
  Kristin: Remains were gathered from battlefields, prison camps, and temporary graves scattered across South Carolina, Georgia, and Florida, then brought here for permanent rest.
• 7:19
  Kristin: More than 9,000 Union soldiers and veterans now lie within Beauford.
• 7:24
  Kristin: Nearly 4,400 are unknown dead.
• 7:27
  Kristin: Among there are roughly 2,800 former prisoners transferred from Cant Lauden, the Confederate prison camp near Millen, Georgia.
• 7:35
  Kristin: Around 1,700 African American Union soldiers also rest here, alongside 117 Confederate dead.
• 7:44
  Kristin: The road brick wall has encircled the cemetery since 1876, sealing the grounds away from the outside world.
• 7:50
  Kristin: The limestone entrance piers arrived decades later, added in 1940.
• 7:55
  Kristin: Yet Buford's design remains unlike most Civil War era cemeteries.
• 8:00
  Kristin: Rather than rigid rows and perfect cemetery, its rows spread outward in the shape of a half-wheel, extending from a central hub near the entrance, like spokes disappearing into the dead.
• 8:11
  Kristin: One of the cemetery's most moving chapters emerged more than a century after the Civil War ended.
• 8:17
  Kristin: In 1987, the remains of 19 soldiers, believed to be members of the famed 54th Massachusetts Volunteer Infantry, were discovered on Foley Island near Charleston.
• 8:28
  Kristin: Two years later, they were reinterred at Beauford with full military honors during a Memorial Day ceremony attended by descendants, Massachusetts Governor Michael Dukakis, and the cast members from the film Glory, who served as honorary guards beside the graves after retelling their unknown story in film.
• 8:46
  Kristin: Four monuments stand scattered throughout the cemetery grounds.
• 8:50
  Kristin: The most striking is a 20-foot granite oblesque erected in 1870 to honor the Union soldiers who died during the Civil War.
• 8:58
  Kristin: It was commissioned by Eliza McGuffin Potter, a woman who cared for the wounded soldiers in Beauford's wartime hospitals.
• 9:05
  Kristin: Potter also helped create another memorial within the cemetery, a marble and brick tomb bearing the names of 175 soldiers from 18 different states.
• 9:15
  Kristin: A Confederate monument was also later dedicated in 1997.
• 9:20
  Kristin: Nearby stands two granite memorials honoring the soldiers of the 54th Massachusetts Volunteer Infantry.
• 9:26
  Kristin: One of the first officially recognized African American regiments raised during the Civil War.
• 9:31
  Kristin: The men of the 54th became immortalized after leading the assault on Fort Wagner in 1863, charging directly into devastating Confederate fire outside Charleston Harbor.
• 9:43
  Kristin: Nearly half of the regiment was killed, wounded, or captured during the attack, including Colonel Robert Goldshaw.
• 9:50
  Kristin: Their sacrifice helped change Northern opinion on African American soldiers and became one of the war's most enduring stories of courage and loss.
• 9:59
  Kristin: Even now, their presence fills Woolman into Beauford itself.
• 10:03
  Kristin: Lingering beneath the moss-covered oaks in quiet southern air that same year, the cemetery was added to the National Register of Historic Places.
• 10:12
  Kristin: Among the thousands resting beneath the moss-covered oaks lies a man whose legacy became immortalized not only through war, but through literature.
• 10:20
  Kristin: Donald Conroy spent much of his life inside the machinery of conflict, serving in World War II, flying combat missions during the Korean War, and completing two tours during the Vietnam War.
• 10:31
  Kristin: Yet the name Donald Conroy is perhaps remembered not for the battles he fought overseas, but for the battles that followed him home.
• 10:38
  Kristin: His most enduring legacy would not emerge from the cockpit of a fighter plane, but from the pages of his son's writing.
• 10:45
  Kristin: His eldest son, Pat Conroy, transformed him into the unforgettable Lieutenant Colonel Bull Meachum and the great Santini.
• 10:52
  Kristin: Proud, charismatic, volatile, and often cruel.
• 10:56
  Kristin: The fictional Bull Meachum became a haunting reflection of life inside the Conroy household, a man shaped by war who carried its violence and discipline back into the walls of his own home.
• 11:07
  Kristin: Pat Conroy would later speak openly about the abuse that haunted his childhood.
• 11:11
  Kristin: The violence was often psychological but sometimes physical as well, particularly toward the boys.
• 11:17
  Kristin: The damage left behind rippled throughout the family for decades.
• 11:20
  Kristin: Pat's sister Carol struggled with severe mental illness.
• 11:24
  Kristin: His brother Tom developed schizophrenia before later taking his own life.
• 11:28
  Kristin: Pat himself attempted suicide in 1975.
• 11:32
  Kristin: Later emitting the memories of his father followed him constantly, resurfing again and again through novels like The Prince of Tides.
• 11:40
  Kristin: Yet time has a strange way of softening even the hardest of ghosts.
• 11:44
  Kristin: After retiring from the Marines, Donald Conroy slowly began rebuilding the fractured relationships with his children.
• 11:50
  Kristin: Ironically, it was the Great Santini itself, the novel exposing so much pain, that became the bridge between father and son.
• 11:58
  Kristin: While Pat wrote the book, Donald assisted him with technical details about military aircraft and marine life.
• 12:04
  Kristin: When the novel was finally published, Donald didn't reject the portrait of Bull Meachim.
• 12:08
  Kristin: Instead, he embraced it.
• 12:10
  Kristin: He even began attending Pat's book signings, proudly autographing copies with the words Donald Conroy, the Great Santini.
• 12:17
  Kristin: Pat once reflected that between them, love was something that could never quite find its own name, something they searched for in other words, in other gestures, and everything except the four syllables that might have made it simple.
• 12:29
  Kristin: In the end, Donald Conroyd's story feels fitting for a place like Beauford, a man shaped by war, feared by those closest to him, yet somehow remembered with both pain and love.
• 12:40
  Kristin: After his retirement, he settled in Atlanta before dying from colon cancer in 1998.
• 12:46
  Kristin: There's something almost ghostly about Donald Conroy's burial here.
• 12:50
  Kristin: In both the novel and film adaptation of the Great Santani, Bill Meachum dies in the crash of his fighter plane, and the character's funeral scene was filmed within Beauford National Cemetery itself.
• 13:01
  Kristin: Years later, while arranging his own burial, Donald Conroy reportedly joked would be the second time he had been laid to rest here.
• 13:09
  Kristin: Today he rests beneath the same quiet southern oaks.
• 13:12
  Kristin: His story folded back into the landscape that once transformed him into fiction.
• 13:17
  Kristin: Yet Beauford Cemetery holds more than just echoes of literary ghosts.
• 13:22
  Kristin: Resting within these grounds is another man whose life carries the full weight of what the cemetery represents, a story that stretches across wars, segregation, sacrifice, nearly the entire span of the 20th century America.
• 13:35
  Kristin: Joseph Simmons was born in 1899 on St.
• 13:38
  Kristin: Helena Island, just a few miles from where he would eventually be laid to rest.
• 13:42
  Kristin: He grew up attending the Penn School, one of the first institutions in the American South created specifically to educate four million slave people and their children, founded in 1862 in the immediate aftermath of the Union occupation of the Sea Islands.
• 13:57
  Kristin: The school that shaped him was itself born from the same rupture of war and emancipation that created this cemetery.
• 14:03
  Kristin: When Simmons enlisted in the Army in February of 1918, the war pulling him in was already consuming a generation.
• 14:10
  Kristin: He was attached to the 5th Marines and fought alongside French forces in three campaigns during World War I, including the Battle of Bellew Wood, one of the bloodiest engagements American forces had seen since the Civil War.
• 14:24
  Kristin: He survived it, aim home.
• 14:26
  Kristin: And then the world ignited again two decades later.
• 14:29
  Kristin: Simmons served again, this time with the 25th Infantry, a part of the Buffalo Soldiers, the legendary black regiments first formed after the Civil War, and named by the very people who fought against them.
• 14:41
  Kristin: By 1944, he had become the assistant bandleader of the 92nd Division, his love for music threading quietly through a military career spanning three and a half decades, 34 years of service, two world wars, and almost nothing to show for in the way of formal recognition from his own country.
• 15:00
  Kristin: But then a few weeks before his 100th birthday, France remembered.
• 15:04
  Kristin: In 1999, the French government awarded Joseph Siemens the Legion d'Anner for his service during World War I, the highest honor the French Republic can bestow.
• 15:14
  Kristin: He died on September 24th of that year, just 21 days short of a century of life.
• 15:19
  Kristin: There's something quietly devastating about that timeline.
• 15:23
  Kristin: A man born the year after the Spanish-American War, educated at a school built for the children of slaves, who fought for a country that couldn't always fight for him, finally recognized in his hundredth year by a foreign government for a war he had survived eight decades earlier.
• 15:39
  Kristin: But perhaps that's why people still wander through cemeteries on Memorial Day, to keep names like Joseph Simmons from disappearing entirely beneath the weight of time.
• 15:49
  Kristin: Because within places like Beauford, history is not preserved through monuments alone.
• 15:53
  Kristin: It survives through the lives carried into these grounds.
• 15:57
  Kristin: Among the countless white stones standing in silent formations rests Ralph Henry Johnson, a young Marine whose life ended in the darkness of the Vietnamese jungle.
• 16:07
  Kristin: He was only 20 years old.
• 16:08
  Kristin: Johnson served as a private first class with Company A, 1st Renaissance Battalion, attached to the 1st Marine Division during the Vietnam War.
• 16:17
  Kristin: On March 5, 1968, during Operation Rock, Johnson was part of a 15-manned Renaissance patrol positioned atop Hill 146, overlooking the Kwanduck Valley, hostile territory controlled almost entirely by the North Vietnamese and Viet Cong forces.
• 16:34
  Kristin: Before dawn, the jungle erupted around them.
• 16:37
  Kristin: Enemy soldiers descended upon the Marines with automatic gunfire, satchel charges, and grenades, turning the isolated observance post into chaos.
• 16:47
  Kristin: Somewhere within the smoke and darkness, a grenade launched directly inside the fighting hall occupied by Johnson and two fellow Marines.
• 16:54
  Kristin: There are moments in war where instinct overtakes thought.
• 16:58
  Kristin: Moments measured not in minutes but in heartbeats.
• 17:01
  Kristin: Johnson saw the grenade, understood exactly what would happen next, and made his choice instantly.
• 17:07
  Kristin: Without a warning to the others, he threw himself onto the grenade.
• 17:11
  Kristin: The blast killed him immediately.
• 17:13
  Kristin: But by absorbing the explosion with his own body, Johnson saved the lives of the Marines beside him, and prevented the enemy from overrunning their position.
• 17:21
  Kristin: For his actions that morning, Johnson was posthumously awarded the Medal of Honor, the nation's highest military decoration for valor.
• 17:30
  Kristin: And even citations struggle to explain acts like these.
• 17:33
  Kristin: Because how do you measure a single decision made in the dark?
• 17:37
  Kristin: One heartbeat, one choice, one young man deciding others should live instead of him.
• 17:43
  Kristin: Today the Vietnam War can feel distant, sealed away inside faded photographs and history books.
• 17:49
  Kristin: But beneath the quiet southern oaks of Beauford, Ralph Henry Johnson still rests among thousands of others claimed by war.
• 17:56
  Kristin: And perhaps that's what Beauford National Cemetery ultimately becomes, not simply a burial ground, but a landscape of unfinished echoes, a place where sacrifice lingers in silence, where history continues breathing beneath the moss and stone, and when the dead quietly ask only one thing of the living, to remember them.
• 18:15
  Kristin: For now the stories of Beauford National Cemetery slide back into the stone, and the dead return into the uneasy rest.
• 18:22
  Kristin: And thank you for walking with us through the veil into Beauford National Cemetery, descending once more into the hauntings of history.
• 18:30
  Kristin: The gate is sealed, the veil drawn.
• 18:32
  Kristin: Yet death keeps no calendar, and so we shall return, as we always do, on the grin.