Join us every Monday for Awww…Mondays. Post a picture that makes you say Awww…and that’s it. Grab your Link From Sandee Make sure you leave a link to your post here and I’ll visit your Awww…Mondays post. What better way to start the week than with a smile.
Today is Flag Day! Did you know that the holiday would not exist but for the actions of a 19-year old schoolteacher from Wisconsin?
In other words, anyone, anywhere can make a difference.
In 1885, Bernard J. Cigrand was teaching in a one-room schoolhouse in Waubeka, Wisconsin. He’d devised a simple class exercise for his students: They were to write essays about the flag in commemoration of the flag’s birthday on June 14.
Perhaps some of these essays mentioned the reason that June 14 is considered to be the flag’s birthday? It was on this day in 1777 that the Continental Congress first adopted a national flag for the newly declared American nation. Congress has made some changes since then, but the basic design of the flag remains the same: “thirteen stripes, alternate red and white” with a union of “thirteen stars, white in a blue field, representing a new constellation.”
Surely Cigrand could not have imagined where this simple class exercise would take him. He would end up spending literally the rest of his life fighting for a national flag holiday.
One year later, in 1886, he wrote an article for a Chicago paper, urging that the flag’s birthday be observed annually. He would eventually author hundreds of articles advocating for the June 14 holiday, and he delivered many speeches. By 1894, he had achieved a public school celebration of Flag Day in Chicago. More than 300,000 children attended!
