Veterans Day is today. For a perspective on the day, and our early Mequon-area veterans, here’s a post originally published on this blog November 11, 2016, and revised, expanded and republished several times since.

Armistice Day — Veterans Day

One hundred and eight years ago today, at the eleventh hour (Paris time), of the eleventh day, of the eleventh month, the Armistice of Compiègne took effect, officially ending the fighting on the Western Front and marking the end of World War I, the optimistically named “War to End All Wars.”

In the United States, the commemoration of the war dead and the Allied victory began in 1919 as Armistice Day, by proclamation of President Woodrow Wilson. Congress created Armistice Day as a legal holiday in 1938. Starting in 1945, a World War II veteran named Raymond Weeks proposed that the commemorations of November 11 be expanded to celebrate all veterans, living and dead. In 1954 Congress and President Eisenhower made that idea official, and this is what we commemorate today. There are many veterans with a connection to the Jonathan Clark house. We honor a few of them in this post.

Many Clark neighbors and friends served during the Civil War, and many of the survivors remained active in the local chapters of the Grand Army of the Republic, the national organization for Union Army veterans. I don’t have a photo of any Ozaukee or Washington county Civil War reunions, but newspaper reports document that they were regular, well-attended, events in the decades following the war. By the end of the century, our assembled local veterans probably looked much like the men in this photo, gathered for the 114th Regimental Reunion, May 30, 1897, Norwich, N. Y. (source: Library of Congress).