(Radio Iowa) – While Memorial Day was this past Monday, today (Friday) marks what was once an important, similar holiday known as Decoration Day and it’s still being honored in northeast Iowa. The Bay Church and Cemetery near Delhi is hosting its annual re-enactment of the first Decoration Day program, according to Bob Sack, secretary of the Upper Bay Cemetery Association. “We’re honoring the soldiers of the Civil War who were from Delhi and Buck Creek, and the event is the first celebrated at that time, August 24th of 1865,” Sack says. “The war was over in May and we’re following that pretty much the same using the same songs, same layout of the program.”

May 30th, or Decoration Day, was established three years after the Civil War ended on May 5th, 1868. Sack says the purpose was for the nation to decorate, with flowers, the graves of all the men and women who gave their lives during wartime. Civil War-era letters from locals will be read as part of the program. “Their letters just grab your heart,” Sack says. “To think of these people that, ‘I miss you, my wife,’ ‘I miss you, my mom and dad, but I’m here and I’m not going to come back because we need to get this war ended,’ and they thought it was going to be a short war, and it wasn’t. It was a long war.” The Decoration Day program will be held in the shadow of Iowa’s first Civil War monument. It was built to honor 15 soldiers from the area who died in the war.

“We talk about people that get PTSD and all,” Sack says, “but with all the cannon fire and all the short-range killing, it’s just amazing what those people went through and what they became when they came home alive, if they came home alive.” Sack says they’ve gone to great lengths to keep the program authentic.”There will be speakers. We’re going to have a religious invocation, a benediction, singing of three patriotic songs that we all know historically,” Sack says. “We will have a 21-gun salute by the Legion and the Black Powder Reenactors in period uniform, and then we’re going to have several shots from the cannon, we got a ten-pound cannon coming out of Dubuque.”

The Decoration Day program will take place at Bay Church and Cemetery, five miles southwest of Delhi at 5:30 PM. All are welcome. Afterwards, people are invited to take a tour of the historic Bay Church and enjoy fellowship and refreshments.