By Audrey Carli

Mrs. Anna Reeves Jarvis was a mother to her community. Before the Civil War, she organized the women of Grafton, West Virginia, to fight deadly childhood diseases. After seven of her own children died, she decided that the best way she could help mothers was to teach them how to prevent childhood illnesses.

Mrs. Jarvis later in life turned again to help mothers. This time she organized a “Mother’s Friendship Day.” At the meetings Mrs. Jarvis spoke to a group of women and challenged them to develop their skills in mothering. She encouraged mothers to play a key role in healing the country’s emotional wounds after the Civil War. She also continued to speak to groups about “The Great Mothers of the World.”

After Mrs. Jarvis’s death, her daughter Anna persuaded her mother’s church, Andrews Methodist Church, to hold a “Mother’s Day” service in memory of her mother’s work as a Sunday school teacher and head of the infant department. In 1907, to mark the second anniversary to Mrs. Jarvis’s death, five hundred carnations were given to the mothers in the congregation as a celebration of mothers.

The following year the church decided to officially proclaim the anniversary of Anna Reeves Jarvis’s death to be Mother’s Day. But the Mother’s Day movement was just beginning. At the same time as the church made plans for a Mother’s Day celebration, Mrs. Jarvis’s daughter was in national observance of Mother’s Day.

Six years after Mrs. Jarvis’s death, West Virginia Governor William Glasscock issued the first Mother’s Day proclamation for the state and asked all West Virginians to “attend church on that day, and wear white carnations.” State after state joined the Mother’s Day movement.

On May 10, 1913, the House of Representatives joined the movement by passing a resolution that “the American mothers is the greatest source of the country’s strength and inspiration…The President and his cabinet, United States senators, and the House, and all officials of the federal government are thereby requested to wear a white carnation or some other white flower on…Mother’s Day.”

On May 8, 1914, Congress passed a resolution calling Americans to display the flag on the second Sunday in May out of “love and reverence for the mothers of our country.”

First Baptist Church, Perryville, Maryland