By Jeffrey Roth GETTYSBURG Pa. (Reuters) - School children scattered flowers on war veterans' graves at Soldier's National Cemetery in Gettysburg, Pennsylvania, on Monday in a 147-year-old Memorial Day tradition started by orphans of dead Union soldiers. Holiday observances at one of the nation's oldest Memorial Day commemorations honor the fallen but also reflect the tragic story of the orphans whose treatment at the hands of the orphanage's matron became a national scandal in the 1870s, said Walter Powell, executive director of the General Society of Mayflower Descendants, in Plymouth, Massachusetts, and formerly a long-time Gettysburg resident and historian. Soldiers' graves have been covered with blossoms each Memorial Day since 1867, when General John Logan, the commander-in-chief of the Grand Army of the Republic, proclaimed it a day “for the purpose of strewing with flowers or otherwise decorating the graves of comrades who died in defense of their country during the late rebellion.” During that first observance, Philinda Humiston and her three children, whose father, Union Sergeant Amos Humiston, died during the Battle of Gettysburg in 1863, marched to the cemetery to decorate graves of Union soldiers.
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